> Coming from GNOME, I was pleasantly surprised that many GNOME extensions I would rely on had equivalent feature functionality built into KDE

Recently I changed distro along with DE and ho boy, my initial customization and polishing in KDE was way shorter to anything I did before in Gnome or Xfce. In order to have a "regular" desktop paradigm workflow there I had to get variety of extensions to revert back or patch up doubtful design, usability decisions.

The only place I was satisfied with Gnome was on laptop - there it surprisingly fit perfectly. Not the vanilla version of course because it still needed some extensions.

Looking across the years, I don't know what's the big masterplan of Gnome devs but it seems it's not building a desktop environment for users but some weird convergence solution that they probably aim at corporations. Not sure for what purpose tho. People here mentioned on a few occasions how hostile that team is against users, their suggestions and complains.