I started with KDE but then I fell in love with Gnome after KDE4 was too buggy to run for me, it was almost like the Vista fiasco, you needed a graphics card just to run a desktop environment, so I moved to Gnome and fell in love with how customizable it was. Then Gnome 3 came out, and my love for Gnome died, all that I loved had been taken out, I understand plug-ins and all, but Gnome was amazing out of the box, then I ran back to KDE my first love, ah this should be a movie or something, but now if anything goes wrong I may consider LXQt, seems promising enough. I don't know why people get religiously stuck to desktop environments, sometimes you just need to move on.

I've heard comments like yours before but this time it made me consider the other side of it. I wonder if your reaction is due to being a power user. If you've been a Windows power user for a while you're probably accustomed to doing things like setting PATH or other environment variables, installing/uninstalling things, starting and stopping services. If you have something that's a little "too much" like Windows but things are in a different place, that may be worse than starting from a mental framework of "completely different now." Particularly, I wonder if it is easier for nearly computer illiterate people to transition from Windows to something very close to Windows, or something else entirely.

I've been in both sides, but you're right to some extent, one of the main things I need is supported by Gnome 3 by default, the "Windows key" whenever I press it, I expect either a dashboard or a menu bar where I can start typing whatever application I want to run, honestly that speeds up my workflow on Windows and Linux (where it is supported), instead of browsing through categories and reading through the list of software, I just press "windows", type what I want to use "Visual Studio", "Qt Creator", hit enter, and move on. That is my main thing, I do enjoy tiling windows. I know there's wonderful tiling managers, but they get more in my way than anything. If I can't get used to it in an hour I just wont bother.

Anecdotally, I was able to set my mother up with an old Thinkpad running Lubuntu and she took right to it. She is pretty much the definition of computer illiterate, so I think you have something there.