I really like KDE plasma, it's the best DE out there once configured to mimick Gnome 2 / Mate, but I agree with you on screenshots! Also, Konsole required much configuration to be not way too busy.

Other than that I don't have too many complaints.

I am absolutely certain they're headed in the right direction, but even some minimal Usability Testing would give them tremendous amount information on all the low-hanging fruit they could fix/optimize and substantially improve the on-boarding for newcomers.