I think Gnome is great. The workflow is amazing imo, better than a clunky Windows-inspired UX, and it’s nice to have a distro I can depend on being bug free without it being a project that moves too slowly.
And those trackpad gestures. Man. They make even Apple’s trackpad gestures feel like you’re using a £300 Acer laptop.
It’s also nice to have a desktop that actually gives a shit about UX and consistency. It’s nice to have a desktop that encourages great third party apps that integrate well with the system and follow excellent design guidelines. It’s nice to have a DE team that are ballsy enough to go against the Win95 UX paradigm and does its own thing, knowing they’ll get extreme amounts of hate for it.
Just because it’s not your cup of tea doesn’t mean it’s a dumpster fire or they hate their users and are doing a circlejerk.
That elitist, tribal mentality is one of the most exasperating things about the Linux community, and is, ironically, a circlejerk of its own.