Nah, GNOME is worse mostly because it’s the default on a ton of distros, so them having this attitude actively get’s in the way of cross-desktop development instead of just being annoying.

Yeah, and when you do, it’s because you don’t like things about the original, and here people are saying what they don’t like.

Nobody disagrees that you can choose something else, but that’s not a reason to be uncritical.