GNOME is not even that good even, not from a programming perspective (glib/gobject/gtk hell) nor from a usability perspective (features being removed left and right, high memory usage, etc). I personally think that tiling WMs do it way better, but even things like openbox and KDE are just more usable than GNOME. I am surprised that it is still the default in so many distros, something related to tradition i presume?