Have you tried Silverblue? If Bluefin’s Gnome customisation isn’t for you I expect Silverblue would be much closer to Workstation
You can turn off all the extentions etc and make it a default Gnome desktop, but the documentation could be a better, since it’s all on the forums.
Oh, it’s actually in the announcement post https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/introduction-to-bluefin/41
Tried Aurora in a VM, and while it ran like shit (probably a VM issue, not Aurora’s), I was shocked that it reported updates, and by the next boot, it had already updated everything.
I run Bazzite on a laptop, so they’re similar, but Aurora really felt clean, polished, and ready for general use.