I love KDE, especially since Plasma 6 release but oh man is the Settings program poorly designed and littered with settings 99% of users will never need.

So many options placed seemingly at random. Similar options like lockscreen, login screen and desktop background settings spread out over 3 different main categories.

Customization options so extensive and granular one can only wonder about their purpose. Even in their latest release blog post they chose to brag about the new ability to change intensity/thickness of frames. I don't think most people care about stuff like this.

Until recently defaults were straight up insane like single click to open folders/launch programs, touchpad scroll being inverted etc.

If you navigate to Settings -> Sound you'll be presented with some options but also buttons in the top right that will open a mostly empty screen with a few additional options. Why not split the whole page into parts and present everything on a single screen? Why not tabs?

Sometimes those buttons in the top right have different behavior. Some will open a whole new page ansd sometimes it's just a popup and other times it's a dropdown.

And oh man just navigating Settings sucks. Main list consists of single and two level options with two level options opening another, mostly empty vertical pane so the actual size of the right pane changes with top text jumping around depending on what you press. So why some settings have two levels and some have tabs and some have those junky top right buttons that need their own back button to show up in the interface whenever they're pressed? I'm not for or against any of those design choices but why all of them at random? I just want some goddamn consistency.

Cherry on top is the bloat most distros choose to install alongside Plasma desktop. Dragon Player? kMail? Does anyone even use these? I dislike Gnome a lot but at least their preinstalled software is minimal, elegant and actively supported/developed. Most KDE programs look like they stopped receiving updates in 2008.

I still think it's a great DE but there's much room for improvement.

Can only speak for myself but the problem is that with KDE there's always stuff I need to go in and change because I don't like the defaults, and then I fall into a rabbit hole of endless tweaking from which it's difficult to escape because no matter how much time I spend I can never get it to be just right.

It's quality issue from my experience. Nobody ever bothered with polishing the defaults and the "option bombardment" is really bad incoherent design instead of having too many things.

I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME.

KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000.

The wealth of things in the KDE settings are things people will likely never change or are things that can be tweaked but don't necessarily need to be. For example, let's look at GNOMEs settings app. It has menus and options for all the things that the average user needs (network settings, mouse and display options, etc.) but leaves out, for example, things that people need to change for specific workflows (like the option to have focus follow the mouse). A settings app should let the user set things needed for the functions of a computer to work properly while separating deeper level customization for those who want it.

I think emacs does a very good job at this. You can configure most of the settings people need to be productive in a text editor from the menu bar while leaving the extremely rich customization of emacs to the options menu and elisp config files