I see lots of comments like this. What I want to know is: if you have this kind of complaint about Gnome, why do you keep using it? There's a bunch of different desktop environments for Linux. KDE works pretty well, and if that doesn't suit you, I've been finding Xfce is quite speedy for me on my work machine.
This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.
Because Gnome is in a league of its own in the UI tastefulness and general UX department.
I like that they are a little opinionated regarding how you use it, in practise that leaves you with a visually tidy and tight desktop environment.
KDE just does not look nice (in my opinion at least), the proportions are weird, menus are too cluttered, it feels like somebody has been throwing widgets at the wall to see what sticks.
I like KDE, but I like Ubuntu more. I've tried Kubuntu, but it's too unstable to be my daily desktop. Gnome is too limiting, but at least it is stable enough.
You can partially improve it by disabling all of the search integrations and just leave application lookup running. Its not perfect, but it fixes the 10 second wait time after you hammer a search term in.
This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.