I use gnome on desktop and I liked it. Keyboard shortcuts are the most important way to control desktop for me, I do not care if it is hard to control using mouse. I do not need hierarchic program menu, start button and lots of configuration dialogs.

It is true that some defaults are annoying and lots of configuration options are missing in GUI programs but it is still possible to configure basically everything using gsettings or gnome extensions (which I prefer over KDE style config).

I do not like some gnome apps (i.e. nautilus or gedit) but there are alternatives so no big problem there.