Interesting, I never saw (or knew) that Gnome 2 received the same treatment. It's heyday was before my time though.

Massive blowback for "removing configuration options".

GNOME 1 had an absurd about of configuration, including many of what the GNOME 2 designers described as "unbreak me" options: options where only one answer could possibly make sense ("make X work"), and worse, some of them were off by default.

GNOME 2 removed those, in favor of better autodetection, better defaults, and similar. However, in doing so, they ended up removing some that were actually important to people, for use cases that weren't as well known. Some of those were added back, or better replacements provided, in the first few versions; as a result, GNOME 2.4 or so was much better than 2.0.

True, I do remember this, like we had to wait a while to get options for nautilus back. It really wasn't as bad as GNOME 3 though. There was a huge difference in the number of options (or % of options if you will) taken away in 2 and 3. The original GNOME 3 was originally a barren straight-jacket, where not even gnome-tweak-tool existed yet (or at least most people didn't know about it.) Remember, extensions didn't come until later and mostly didn't even work until yet later.

The Gnome3 developers publicly said that they didn't want anyone changing anything on it, and didn't believe that there should be any configuration options.