When Gnome 3 was introduced, they not only changed everything, without any way to get it functioning anything like how people were used to, but they also made it more or less impossible for Gnome 2 and 3 to reside on the same box. Overnight a system upgrade massively broke workflows with no way to go back.

Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly.

This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.