> Can do part of it in tweaks, which is a separate configuration app, but then some of it requires extensions.

I'm not sure why you think requiring extensions is a bad idea. I have tried out at least 20 GNOME extensions (and kept maybe a third), and I appreciate the flexible underlying architecture to allow extensions to flourish. With extensions, the same GNOME can have Windows XP style taskbars or Mac-style docks or i3-style tiling or anything in between.

Certainly it would be a more refined experience if the core developers took care of every single possible customization users could want under the sun, but at some point it's more effective to outsource that to other developers. Either that or you end up with Apple-style highly uncustomizable experience designed by a UX designer, which is not what I want.

Extensions are a pragmatic choice.

Extensibility can be nice, but the experience has a lot of friction. If you want something that isn't bog standard, you need to get or make an extension.

Making one is more work than what I can do from basic configuration settings in KDE. I want to spend my time on other projects. The marketplace suffers from the same problems as most marketplaces. Plenty of unmaintained extensions. No guarantees of quality. Now I need to do research on extensions instead of just changing a configuration setting.

The existence of extensions allows gnome devs to figure they don't have to support basic features because someone will make an extension for it.

Extension configurations don't live in the same place as standard configurations.

The experience is fragmented and has friction.

The problem is that the extension experience can be really bad. There is no extension API; instead Extensions have (almost) full access to GNOME Shell's code.

This makes them incredibly powerful and flexible... but also fragile. Extensions can crash GNOME Shell/mutter. On Wayland that means your entire session goes down with GNOME Shell. Extensions can interfere with each other, and if you are an extension developer, you may need to update (or at least check) your extension every 6 months (GNOMEs release cycle).

Supporting extensions is great, but it needs to be done properly. GNOME doesn’t provide a proper extension API which forces devs to muck with GNOME internals, which makes extensions much more flakey than they need to be and causes them to break every other GNOME release.

The last time I used Gnome as my primary desktop (that was still in the Gnome 3 days) extensions broke at every update. I was still using Arch Linux at the time, so it was annoying because every ~6 months a few of my extensions would be broken for 1~2 weeks.

AFAIK Gnome extensions still doesn't have a stable API, so this issue is still present today.

I've used gnome for 7 years in Fedora. Often certain extensions stopped working betweenv after Fedora big upgrades (i.e. from 32 to 33). The JavaScript engine that runs extensions had many memory leaks bugs so I had to kill the gnome-shell process on a TTY session.

After 7 years I was fed up and switched to KDE and never looked back

They also make the core more complicated; what I have seen of Gnome internals is pretty messy imo.

There's no free lunch in software, every choice is some kind of compromise.