Gnome developers gave pretty thorough reasons why they made certain changes in UI and code design, or was I hallucinating that period of my life? I mean, just because one doesn't like designers' choices doesn't equate to "couldn't extract reasoning". Also, it's their project, and I hate that they ignored the user community it still fell under their authority to do it and let users decide if they would tolerate it or move to a different windowing system. Personally I just moved back to KDE and have stayed there, other than very limited resource systems where I use lxde or just straight terminal+tmux.