That was my experience, too. After tinkering with KDE a while, I tried GNOME, added a couple of extensions, and it was like a wave of relief when it suddenly turned into almost exactly what I wanted the entire time.
It’s a bit weird. KDE is so customizable that I don’t want to do it. If a distro has nice defaults, great, but if I’d have to start with a fresh, default KDE install, I wouldn’t want to bother.