When was the last time you used it? Things have vastly improved recently.

> often badly rendered fonts (fuzzy, weird aliasing)

Gnome-tweak-tools and the infinality package makes fonts and aliasing comparable to OSX. As with most Linux things, it requires a bit of tweaking. Mostly due to politics and FOSS, as is the case with the fonts.

Newer Gnome apps have clean padding and margins.