Nothing against options, but having distros with a default on Gnome just seems wrong, defaults are supposed to be good and complete.

Wish somebody would tell that to the Emacs maintainers.

I'll never understand this. It's like people who swear by xfce. Both are borderline unusable to me, but gnome certainly isn't in that category, despite its bugs.

Which feature(s) exactly do you miss on XFCE that makes it unusable in comparision to GNOME?

Didn't mean to pick on xfce, I haven't used it in a couple years to be fair. But when I did, it just didn't fit my workflow that well. For example, I'm used to pressing command+space and getting system-wide search for all files and apps. This is basically the default behavior on gnome, I just needed to remap the shortcut. I also often move desktops and the "activities" view makes that really simple.

Xfce is stable, lightning fast, and best of all, its users never have to learn a new interface layout every other year.