>I understand that you use GNOME and are passionate about it, but your insistence on right and wrong answers is absolutely not what drives the Linux community.

So your statements here aren't correct. Please avoid accusing me of being a fanboy. If you really want to know my opinion, I'll use any desktop and I'm not passionate about any of them, GNOME is just one of them. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. But if you're asking questions about GNOME and GTK then I'll give you straight answers, they are also part of the "Linux community" and it doesn't help either of us to misrepresent them. There are certain facts about that which it is not helpful for us to disagree on, because they are just that: facts, not opinions.

>Then don't make them. Just do what every other desktop has done since 1992, give people the option to configure things the way they want

Well some users may have no need to configure that. And like I was saying with complex apps, it may be that you don't need to give users a really complicated way to configure every little detail. It may be that what they really want is just a way to swap between "presets" and that will be enough for everyone. You don't know until you actually do the design work and iterate. This of course is a more complex and nuanced topic than just saying "give us an option" or "give us a default" or something like that.

>If corner-cutting starts to affect power users, you need to go back to the drawing board and re-think things.

Well no, in my experience power users are just as likely to be trying to accomplish something specific like that. When you get down to it their usage patterns are not particularly different.

>Yeah, real motivation going on there. Of the 4 apps they mention needing CSD, only one got it. Is that really what 3 years of progress should look like for that kind of initiative?

I really don't know what their progress goals are but there are many other GNOME apps not listed there that use CSD, you should look at them if you're interested to fully understand the progress.

>GNOME is not Linux, and the issue is that the GNOME developers are making too many decisions on behalf of the end user.

Yes I agree that GNOME is not Linux. But GNOME developers are making decisions on behalf of GNOME users. That's what they're supposed to do, those are the end users they support. I don't understand what your issue here is. If you don't use any GNOME software then their decisions won't affect you.

>I do take issue when I can't use a desktop environment because my preference for handling packages is apparently verboten

Which preference is this? Can you elaborate?

>and now they've decided to remove features that I liked. It's a regression on the level of dropping the Unity desktop, but even more user-hostile.

I'm sorry to hear that, but I hope you can understand that every project cannot support infinite features. If it's desired to add a new feature then sometimes an older feature that has some overlap with it will have to be removed. That's just the unfortunate reality, nobody is trying to be hostile to you. And it's not really feasible to ask software developers to stop adding new features, if they did this then everything would stagnate.

>And even still, I have a hard time calling GNOME in it's current state much of a platform. It exhibits constant crashing issues on my Haswell devices which means I can't use it on half my devices, and it only truly functions on one or two distros.

Can you please report these bugs? I've never experienced this. If those are legitimate bugs then I'm sure someone will want to have them fixed. It could possibly be a driver issue that is not strictly related to GNOME.

>Not to go "us vs them", but KDE has no problem maintaining a stable, usable desktop even across major releases. I'm utterly dumbfounded by how the current maintainers of GNOME feel so self-righteous in their redesign, especially considering the state of their recent releases.

Please understand that not every project has the resources to test with every hardware combination, it may just be that you hit some unusual and unfortunate combination of hardware and software that blows up. It's just lucky for you that KDE doesn't hit that.