I don't think it's fair to call GNOME unusable, even if I prefer it with Dash to Panel extension, or frankly, even though I prefer KDE Plasma.

As is gnome 3

GNOME these days is pretty great. Quick tap of the super key and then type to launch something. Super left, right, or up arrow to snap to the side or maximize. Ctrl-alt left/right to switch workspaces. Doing that while holding shift will move the current selected window to the next workspace.

Plus GNOME 3 introduced the concept of extensions, which are as powerful as the old Firefox extensions were. You can change literally anything about the shell to suit your needs.

It is pretty great and I use it daily, but there are some questionable things... Like how we can't Alt+Space+N to minimize a window anymore. That has been a hotkey on every Windows and Linux OS since forever.