It will still have the same unusable look and feel as Gnome 3, so it doesn't even matter what name they give. It was 9 years ago, but it still hurts me to think about the release of Gnome 3 and all the different ways they went downhill with this once-beautiful project. Seriously, damn the people who took over the direction of Gnome. Now even Wayland development is mostly focused on Gnome. Where's my time machine?
Thinking seriously about moving to KDE with all these schengens happening around Gnome. All the feature removing between 2 to 3 was already annoying. I wanted HiDPI support and productivity effects from Compiz (like drawing on the screen), not a fake Mac.
My weapon of choice is kubuntu since 18.04 LTS. The only complaint I have is that konsole's cut/paste/selection mechanism eventually ceases to work (copy or select does nothing, old buffer contents remain) after a konsole process has been running for a few weeks.
Unlike your desire for effects, I prefer KDE because you can still completely disable effects and the compositing that make it performant and get excellent, glitch free remote desktop performance over a fast local network using VNC; almost no perceptible lag in normal development actively.
KDE has matured. They took the 4.x fiasco to heart and now KDE development is highly conservative and unobtrusive. I'm frankly amazed; popular Linux desktop environments have such a long history of design failures due to iconoclasts blowing everything up that the current state of KDE seems almost miraculous.
Gnome has its own distinctive feel for me, and it feels entirely different from mac or windows. I don't really understand the hate i keep seeing on here to be honest.