They produce bad software with a bad interface based on a bad theory of how people use things and when people critique their bad software they give bad reasons, argued badly, with a bad attitude and in bad faith to boot.

It truly needs its own fractal of bad design essay save it would have to a farce in 7 parts.

To say that they targeted a different kind of user is insufficiently descriptive. 3.0 was the beginning of ticking off the users they actually had in order to target users they wish they could get with a total package that such users could never encounter in a million years because joe average wasn't installing Linux in 2011 regardless of how simple you made the interface.

9 years later the Linux user base is virtually unchanged and gnome 3 is no longer horrifying as 9 years of labor have rendered it modestly acceptable after the worst ideas were put off or mitigated.

If you spent 300k building a hovel where the roof fell in quarterly and you after much consternation and a decade of work figured out how to keep the roof mostly in place most of the time I would pretty much expect such a project to be the go to horror story among home builders in the neighborhood.

This isn't meanness its just honesty.