Beyond that... the system appearance used prior to Platinum was, simply put, crude. It was an outgrowth of a UI design which had originally been constructed for black-and-white systems with limited CPU power, and it wasn't especially consistent. It lacked standard UI elements for many controls which had become common, like dropdown menus, utility windows, disclosure triangles, or tristate checkboxes, forcing many applications to implement their own inconsistent versions of these items. Even for the UI elements it implemented, like buttons and checkboxes, its appearance was simplistic in the extreme -- buttons were black outlined round-rects; checkboxes were black outlined squares, etc. There was very little use of color or shading outside of window chrome -- most of the UI was black and white, just as it had been from the start.
Hard disagree, Gnome 3 is like i3 except without the legacy cruft.
While we've been thrown a few bones like start menu search, most of the gratuitous changes have been for the worse. Sleeker but harder to use for professionals. Gnome 2 was approaching Win2k but then made a hard turn into tablet/novice land. XFCE is in the neighborhood but never got to the level of Win2k.
I didn't care for skinz in the 90's and instead of going away, every app now is a unpredictable skinned mess.