What I see with gnomes though is that shedding the customization doesn’t actually make for a more solid project. The fact Wayland fractional scale took as long as it did to stabilize despite mostly working tells me gnome didn’t care about the real hardware that makes up the bulk of what exists in the world.

Similarly, it seems like plasma has a massive technical edge just in handling things like pipewire capture, etc. I find KDE is typically smoother and the gnome overview animation almost always stutters regardless of the computer I use it on from discrete gpu desktops down to mobile things.

So I can say that it seems from my experience the gnome project has naval gazed and built a model of the computing landscape they target that is divorced from reality.

I think your defense gets at the difference between a power user and a ricer. They are orthogonal. Gnome rejects ricing. There is one way. That’s fine. I configure stock KDE by changing 2 settings, 1 of which exists in gnome. But I do need to actually do things with my computers which is why the androidification dig hits.

What I will praise unreservedly is the gnome circle apps and broader which are typically polished focused and attractive.

So to me gnome fails at a desktop but has managed to foster a culture around themselves that leads to solid app development.