[amaranth]

GNOME started down their current path through a combination of Easel (started by the people who designed the Macintosh) designing nautilus and icon sets and trying to get the desktop to be more cohesive and Sun pushing hard on accessibility which also meant making things clear and consistent. Those influences were boiled down into the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines which all apps are supposed to follow.

The easiest way to make things clear and consistent is to have less things, the idea is you have a clean base then figure out how to add the things people are still wanting the most. If you had whole development teams working on these things then that would work (see macOS) but without that people implement the simplest parts and avoid the rest due to it not being fun, not having an agreed design for them, the design being too contentious, or just a lack of time.