Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons. Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for daring to take tough decisions for the greater good.

I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.

There was a very good post here in Hacker News explaining why the decisions that GNOME (and others as well) have taken are bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541

Yes I saw this the other day. The post is incorrect in several ways but there are some valid opinions in there that I agree with too.

Nothing as big as a DE is perfect, thankfully it's broadly moving in the right direction.

They're not "legacy features" merely because your tastes have changed. They're still just "features." Calling them mean names doesn't change that, it just makes it harder to take your argument in good faith -- same as calling desktop icons "bad habits." I'm a happy GNOME user but ascribing moral judgements to common computer functionality is kind of weird.

This is debatable because it's a matter of taste (or habit), but one thing they got right is optimizing the interface for Touchscreens.

How is removing features "for the greater good"?