>Also your focus on the form and the distinction between the GNOME Desktop and the GNOME Foundation is deflective when we are primarily talking about user satisfaction for which you made no argument at all besides your personal anecdotes.

There's no argument to make, user satisfaction is entirely subjective and it depends very much on which users the maintainers decide they want to pursue. It's well within their means to decide they want to change or shrink their userbase for any reason. And plus it's open source so even if that happened it may not be a problem because any person can decide to start contributing or fork it, thus bringing in new users if that's what they want.

>Why is GNOME considered so great?

These type of questions are a lot more interesting questions for me to answer, I wish you had asked these earlier. I don't think I would argue it's great, but I think GNOME is popular because they have a mostly complete platform. The quality of individual parts may vary but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Otherwise known as network effects. And I would say the same thing is true of Windows or Android any other major desktop OS that are their own platforms.

>Why are 8 of the most downloaded/popular extensions designed to rectify the bad decisions made by the GNOME development team?

Not sure I understand, are you criticizing GNOME for having extensions? Again "bad decision" is completely subjective, that's why you can choose which extensions you want to install or not install. That's why KDE also has extensions.

>Why are there countless forks?

Well no, currently there are only two notable forks, MATE and Cinnamon. And I wouldn't say either of them compete directly with GNOME, they have different goals. But also, any popular open source project has forks. If you want something that actually has countless forks, see the Linux kernel.

>It's not prejudice; it's a consistent reaction from multiple people in this thread to your comments. You might want to reflect on why that is and consider how your responses might be perceived

In this thread I've been on the receiving end of a bunch of conspiracy theories and gaslighting so I don't consider that type of reaction to be reasonable or worth reflecting on, it's not even appropriate to post that stuff on this website.

>No one is suggesting that you represent the entire GNOME community—just that your behavior reflects poorly on its less favorable aspects.

No sorry, I have to push back again here. I could sum up my view as "GNOME is not that bad" and I really don't think that's any kind of notable behavior, or something that reflects on anything, or even fulfills this abstract idea of favorability. I couldn't care less what transgressions other community members did either. Come on, what am I supposed to do here? Go looking through years of IRC logs and Twitter comments reading flame wars, to make sure I don't accidentally say something similar to what somebody on "the wrong side" said in the flame war? To be honest I had a period in my life where I really didn't like GNOME at all and I probably said a lot of the same things being said here about how bad it is!

>What would be an acceptable way to express this sentiment while maintaining the same level of concern?

How would such a concern ever be quantified empirically? And who decides just what the community is? Is that anyone who's ever tried Linux once in their life? Or do they have to have used it within the last month? Year? Decade? I could go on here, whatever we come up with is a likely minimum of millions of people, can any of us conclusively speak for all of them?

See what I'm getting at here? The statement is so vague, IMO it doesn't actually communicate any information and it's just going to inflame. The users who think GNOME is terrible already agree with you and will only be riled up by hearing that. The users who are happy won't learn anything new from being told that and they'll think you're being a bit of a jerk by suggesting their feelings are wrong.