I think GNOME actually gets a lot right, perhaps even more than KDE for the average use case, but has a few high visibility misses and perhaps suffers from muddled focus by trying to also accommodate smartphones.

With a few key changes like bringing back the minimize button by default, integrating the dash-to-dock extension by default, and dropping the crusade against proper menubars it’d be easily the most well rounded and DE with the most usable out-of-the-box experience.

KDE shares the problem of muddled focus between desktop and mobile, but instead of lacking functionality instead has issues with its design feeling somewhat amateur, as well as bad defaults. KDE can be great if tuned extensively but without tuning it’s a mess.

I do agree that’s it’s good to have more players in the DE space, because no existing option has fully cracked it and more options is always good. It would be nice if more DEs shared work between each other (is it really necessary for there to be 3+ forks of Nautilus?) but oh well.

What I want to see most is a new UI library. Qt is nice from a technical perspective, but it being tied to C++ and thus lacking quality, up to date, idiomatic bindings for other languages really hurts it, as does its licensing shuffle. GTK is wonderfully flexible because it has bindings for almost every language ever, but comes with frequent breaking changes and forced GNOMEisms, and feels awkward outside of Linux. The ideal UI library would have GTK’s flexibility with QT’s technical strengths and platform adaptivity.