There is nothing wrong with being opinionated, see Rails and DHH - it's not everybody's cup of tea, but it worked well for the audience it was designed for.

As I understand the issue most people have with GNOME is the choices the developers seem to be making are making the UI prettier, but making the UX a lot worse. Plus the out of the box defaults are pretty bad - if you install GNOME on Arch it's going to be completely different to a customised distribution like Fedora Workstation.