I love GNOME 3. I have heard a lot of people complain about it bitterly but after I switched to it and got used to it, I find that it makes for a smooth workflow. I can now forget about "minimise", "how many workspaces do I have" and a few other things that were in my head in earlier interfaces.
Overall, I think GNOME has done good work with GNOME 3. I have introduced it to my colleagues at work and whoever has tried it, is happy with it.
YMMV but like I already said, I love it and I am looking forward to this new release.
Same here, after I've used Ubuntu for a few good years, which used to have a modified version of the GNOME destkop, I've switched to the new Unity desktop for a couple of years, until it started to ditch everything GNOME related... In the mean time, I've heard a lot of nasty things about the GNOME 3 desktop... but I made a little research about the extensions you can install and I plunged into it... and now I love my GNOME 3 desktop and can't live without it! Long live GNOME!
I really want to like Gnome 3 as I think they do many things 'right' (for values of 'right' equal to how I like to have them done), but then they keep going and shooting themselves in the foot. Removing features I use with new releases, insisting on shifting functionality from core to extensions and then breaking those extensions, a rather unfriendly approach towards users and so on.
Overall, I think GNOME has done good work with GNOME 3. I have introduced it to my colleagues at work and whoever has tried it, is happy with it.
YMMV but like I already said, I love it and I am looking forward to this new release.