I think in general, the GNOME foundation does a lot of good stuff overall, but I do not like the direction GNOME and Mutter have taken. Personally, I think that a lot of modern design is focused more on looking pleasing to UX/UI designers than it is focusing on genuine usability.

As an example, I feel like the usability of GNOME apps with client-side decorations is a lot poorer than the previous more traditional paradigms. The older paradigm may not be flawless, but it was much more consistent across applications, and most importantly, it's very easy to figure out. Trying to figure out how to do things in GNOME applications these days can be an exercise in frustration. I don't really want to play a game where I try to figure out what the trendy way to access the Settings dialog for a program is. Is it going to be somewhere in the global menu bar, or is it going to be on some nondescript button with dots or lines in it, or maybe something even MORE exciting? In the past, the worst thing was having to look through some defacto standard menus to find it. With modern applications, who knows.

Meanwhile, Mutter feels like it is resistant to practical concerns: they dug their heels on on server-side decorations, which did exactly what anyone could've told them it was going to do; now a bunch of applications have no or horribly broken borders on GNOME. I mean look, I know "it's really the application's fault because we said they had to deal with this" but also, I hope everyone understands that it genuinely doesn't matter, the outcome was predetermined based on the input.

On that front, I have a laundry list of complaints over how the direction Wayland has taken in GNOME in general, especially pushing things to clunky and unusable DBus interfaces that don't cover all of the important and already-common desktop use cases well enough. While I understand some of the reasoning, it is extremely difficult to argue that this isn't a focus on developer ideals over what would be ideal for users. Arguing that it's not "waylandy" to have input emulation in the Wayland protocol thus forcing you to use another binary protocol that's similar to Wayland but that you need to negotiate over DBus using desktop portals seems like a step very far in a weird direction when you are literally already speaking to the same compositor that's responsible for _dispatching_ input events.

Old man yells at cloud, but yeah GNOME definitely is "my way or the highway" in every regard, absolutely not a bastion of user-centric design or architecture. And that can be good if that's what you want, but I have a feeling it would be easily displaced by something that had a better attitude toward user concerns and pain points.

Even if KDE is buggy, it's extremely hard to argue it's not more user-centric. I'm wholly unsurprised when I see something like XWaylandVideoBridge coming out of KDE, as it's born out of trying to make things work for users rather than drawing a hardline.

That said, I do personally think GNOME and GTK4 are far better on phones and tablets than desktops. It's funny, because I simply would not consider them good options for desktop applications, but it all makes a lot more sense when you try it with a touchscreen. (That said, I don't view this as much of a saving grace because I've come to the conclusion that convergence is mostly a lie, something that you think is a good idea but in reality it's not; you just get something that's mostly bad on desktop, mostly bad on phone/tablet, or just generally not good on anything. GNOME is closer, IMO, to "mostly bad on desktop.")