GNOME is not the only criterion people use to choose a distribution. I choose my distributions based on package managers, hardware support, and stability. For package managers I only feel good with dpkg or pacman, which automatically eliminates a lot of other distros. Not all of the remainder has his hardware support, and out of that, not all of those have good stability (with updates, or software bugs). This means that for me, all that remains on the playing field are Arch Linux (because I'm more willing to tolerate it), and Ubuntu derivatives.

If the price of having to use e.g. Ubuntu is having to run Gnome, I'll pay it just to get the other benefits.