I still like the look and feel of GNOME a lot so I spent a little time putting it together that way. I want a simple desktop with small elements to maximize real estate for windows. I also use the small taskbar on my work computer for the same reason. But with my work computer, I do show window titles because I usually have at least 5 workbooks open at once so it's nice to see which is which when I need to switch between them.
I love KDE's application launcher. It feels very Windows XP with the way it sorts things. It just makes complete sense.
Century Gothic may not be the most readable font in the world, but I think it has an old school charm to it.
It's been a bumpy road. I have strong memories of Gnome devs explaining to users how wrong they were to dislike Nautilus's awful spatial mode. And when that guy refused to implement a switch off option because users were wrong to ask for it.
Now really, it's quite functional once you've tweaked with gnome-tools and added vital extensions. You also have to remember useless stuff such as "Video" means "Totem". I'll just never understand why they don't really care about sane defaults.
except that extensions are second class citizens at best, on gnome. Some (or all, sometimes) of them will break after an update.
I looked this up. Yeah, it's awful, and the defense seems unhinged, really blaming people who dislike it.