I use Gnome as my main driver, have for the last 7-ish years, and on and off before that, so I’m no Gnome hater by any means, but I’ve been using Linux since 1996. Part of what I LOVED was absolute control. I used 1990’s themeable Gnome and then VTWM as my primary window manager because you could script EVERY aspect of your experience (I got rid of title bars for example). Modern Gnome meets my daily driver needs best, but I use KDE where I can elsewhere because it’s just fighting against me less for ideological reasons. I get you need a like philosophy for a project like Gnome to not go crazy, but like… I’d honestly be fine if you could reliably have your basic extensions survive updates, but a random set of extensions that make your desktop how you like die for x months (or maybe permanently) with EVERY new version, and yes, eventually an equivalent or better extension will come along, but a lot of why I like open source is NOT having my preferred windowing settings killed by committee whim with updates. I lag behind updating which helps, but it’s no panacea. If the extensions for basic window manager features that should be there like theming and such, it would be a better user experience because you would have things you can rely on not changing per release.
I use Gnome as my main driver, have for the last 7-ish years, and on and off before that, so I’m no Gnome hater by any means, but I’ve been using Linux since 1996. Part of what I LOVED was absolute control. I used 1990’s themeable Gnome and then VTWM as my primary window manager because you could script EVERY aspect of your experience (I got rid of title bars for example). Modern Gnome meets my daily driver needs best, but I use KDE where I can elsewhere because it’s just fighting against me less for ideological reasons. I get you need a like philosophy for a project like Gnome to not go crazy, but like… I’d honestly be fine if you could reliably have your basic extensions survive updates, but a random set of extensions that make your desktop how you like die for x months (or maybe permanently) with EVERY new version, and yes, eventually an equivalent or better extension will come along, but a lot of why I like open source is NOT having my preferred windowing settings killed by committee whim with updates. I lag behind updating which helps, but it’s no panacea. If the extensions for basic window manager features that should be there like theming and such, it would be a better user experience because you would have things you can rely on not changing per release.