I used Gnome on a slower laptop the other day, and I have to say it's no longer the slow beast it was when it was first released. And in fact, I find the Gnome Shell to be pretty intuitive and easy to use.

Gnome is getting better and better all the time, I still hope for the year of the Linux Desktop, but I'm eternally optimistic.

On the other hand, maybe there's not going to be a Year of the (any) Desktop at all anymore...

I'm on a netbook and had to dissapointedly move away from both Openbox and Xfce as there kept being issues. I'm now on LXDE and very happy. These things bloat over time it seems.

GNOME 3 was released 6 years ago. It has gone through several iterations since then.

Of course it has. As I said, this is subjective, but I provide support for a few non technical users (scientists/medical professionals) using the latest Ubuntu with Gnome 3 and I find it slow and unintuitive in comparison to my preferred setup. It has a superficial resemblance to MacOS/Windows which is a plus for some users.

More to the point, my comment was a criticism of the article rather than Gnome. Most of these "6 reasons" can be easily applied to any actively developed environment.

But the basic design principles remain.

But it's not slow and unintuitive anymore

How is meta (windows?) + ` intuitive? It is only intuitive if you come from Mac os.

Disable animations in gnome tweak tool to make it feel a lot more snappy.