"Same goes for user themes, shell patches and tweak tools. They are all a testament to the fact that people want to extend GNOME, so your next logical step should not be blocking them out."

I don't know what is meant here by blocking them out. All these tools still exist. And theming has seen improvements, GNOME 42 is finally getting a real dark mode and not a hack like the old dark theme setting is. Yes, they're finally catching up to KDE here after years. The changes there should benefit user themes, although user themes will always probably be unsupported and risk breakage because fundamentally they are doing things that the app developer didn't intend and didn't test for. That's not app developers doing it to be hostile, it's an actual technical limitation with themes: if you reskin an app then you have infinite choices of colors/icons/shapes/etc that you could plug in and it's not realistic for app developers to test for and anticipate every single possible combination that everyone is going to want to use. Yes I understand that it's frustrating these things are not supported and can break sometimes but the reason it is like that is because of lack of resources. If there was a lot more people working on themes and testing them and fixing the issues then maybe it would go faster and some more theming options could become officially supported. But in order to do that and have it work then people are going to have to compromise here and only focus on a few things at a time, like I said it's not going to be technically possible to support infinite combinations of themes and have all of them work well.

"If I level a complaint about KDE, XFCE, or hell, even the goddamn Elementary desktop, I generally get a thoughtful response with someone showing me how to resolve the issue, or pointing to an upstream patch that fixes it"

I don't think I can point you towards working upstream patches but I can point you towards people that are thinking about the issues and working on them. I referred to this before but part of the problem here is that the things you're asking for are technically challenging, it's not a matter of just here's a 100 line patch and it's fixed. These are conversations and projects that need to happen over long periods of time with collaboration from many people. And when many of them are volunteers that are only available sporadically then it can be tough to get them all aligned in a timely manner.

"You can call things like thumbnails in the filepicker inconsequential"

I have never said it's inconsequential, in fact my feeling is the opposite. It should be fixed but that is another thing that's not technically easy to do. There actually is a much longer technical conversation we could have here about this but it's not possible to have it when someone is just bringing it up as a talking point against GNOME.

"The issue starts with attitude, and the culture of GNOME is quite obviously not improving. No amount of CoC pull requests can fix that, especially when project leaders are flying off the handle at System76 for trying to improve on their desktop."

Please don't assume the opinions of one or two developers is shared by everyone. I wasn't happy with how the System76 situation was handled and I've actually been trying to help reduce the heat, and I know that some GNOME developers also weren't happy with it either and wish it could have gone down better. But I am not a project leader so maybe that doesn't matter to you.

"Why even have these discussions if we're just going to end them with a pointless us-vs-them fight where you ultimately tell me to stop using GNOME if I disagree."

I don't understand what this has to do with GNOME. If you use KDE and you find you really don't like it, then you'll stop using it and use something else. If you use Windows 11 and you find you really don't like it, then you'll stop using it and use something else. And so on. Or would you force yourself to use them and be miserable? I wouldn't want you to do that. I'm not telling you this like it's a fight, every one of us has a real choice to make about what our preferences are and it's a personal decision that nobody else can make for us. If something is going to take years to fix then I'm trying to do the responsible thing and tell you that you'll have to either change your expectations, or you'll have to go spend your time elsewhere because waiting is not going to be worth it. Yeah I understand that's not what you want to hear but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that everything is fine and it's going to be finished tomorrow. You are going to have to exercise some patience here. That's just me being honest and not trying to bullshit you.

And I want to reiterate, I have no personal attachment to GNOME. I think it's good at some things. KDE is also good. I've praised KDE several times in this comment thread. If you really like KDE then that's what you should use. I'm very happy to recommend it. It has helped me when GNOME was not able to do some things I wanted, and GNOME has helped me when KDE was not able to do some other things I wanted. I don't think it's feasible to expect them both to do all the same things, they are two different projects with two different goals.