All I can say is that GNOME 3 seems to take Havoc Pennington's famous essay about as far as it can go, considering configurability a bug. I don't know exactly when it started, but it definitely came to my attention bigtime with the infamous gnome-screensaver.
Yes, I would agree that a lot of GNOME developers still view that as a design goal. But not all do, and even so, having less configurability doesn't mean less features. If you ask me, practically speaking, what it has meant is that there is a larger collection of smaller apps to choose from. So if the app you want lacks a configuration option, you might be better served by trying to find a different app that just works the way you want the first time.