GNOME is still in their KDE 4.x days where it needs time to mature.
KDE 3 was loved, KDE 4 made a ton of breaking changes, and was reviled. KDE 5/6 are now butter smooth and fixed all the issues from the 3 -> 4 transition
GNOME 4/5 will probably come back into the loved category if they start stabilizing the extension system some more
GNOME 2 was different and easy to customize
GNOME is still in their KDE 4.x days where it needs time to mature.
KDE 3 was loved, KDE 4 made a ton of breaking changes, and was reviled. KDE 5/6 are now butter smooth and fixed all the issues from the 3 -> 4 transition
GNOME 4/5 will probably come back into the loved category if they start stabilizing the extension system some more
There is no GNOME 5. They are up to GNOME 48 now.
Yeah, their branding makes it harder to recover.
I don’t know how they’ll change their versioning in the future, so I just went with that.
If they don’t make an obvious split to when the extension system is stable, they may never get that new beloved version like KDE managed