A lot of this reflects something I've noticed about development in the Gnome world: they decide exactly how interfaces should be used, and lock that in. As time progresses, they drop more and more customizability out of their products, and as a result, you're increasingly left with a choice between doing things their way, or mucking around in their re-envisioning of the Windows Registry or even program source code.

A big one for me is keyboard input: at one point, I could use the Super key for whatever I liked, and I could easily set the right Alt key to be a Compose key. Now, there is no reclaiming the Super key from hard-coded shortcuts (Unity is even worse about this!), and the Compose key is outright missing from the keyboard settings menu.

The obvious fix is simply not to use Gnome. I'm personally partial to Openbox; it's amenable to customization in a way I don't think Gnome will ever be again. The problem is that with the flurry of new system(d?) technologies -- dbus, policykit, consolekit, who knows what the hell else -- nothing works. I can't even mount removable drives from any file manager under an Openbox session now. At the moment, Gnome is the only system sufficiently tightly coupled into this stuff to work at all, and that's frustrating.