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I've used GNOME in the past and always switched back to XFCE. I could never tolerate GNOME for long, even with tweaks. However, now that Fedora 35 + Nvidia + Wayland (aside from some super annoying driver bugs) is now a thing, I wanted to give it a shot. It does mainly work and the performance is impressive. However, GNOME's UI is... not my thing to say the least.
First, let's start with Nautilus. There is no address bar, meaning you can't type in a path. Here's a Stackexchange answer on why:
https://askubuntu.com/a/411212
* The design of nautilus: Having an option to display both would require disproportionate vertical widening of the icons area, as now there would be two lines required to display the pathbar as well as address bar. But then other buttons on the right would have slack space above and below them, unless they readjust themselves, which is again a big design question by itself.
* The aesthetics of nautilus: Having both pathbar and address bar would be awfully ugly to see.
* Most people, and I mean barring a handful of exceptions like you and me, people have preference for either. Its a clear choice for them. Having an option to "tweak" this would mean cluttering the preferences section of nautilus, again to no avail. In fact, in the recent version, you can see that a lot of configuration and menu options have been removed, or hidden to make the overall experience of the nautilus very very simple.
* Wastage of screen real-estate: You would require only either of them at any point. This is true even if you are a person who use both of them multiple times throughout the day. You would want just either of them at any time, and it just makes sense, even from your point of view, to actually press Ctrl + L when you want the access to the other thing. Seeing the unrequired alternative on the screen would clutter the thinking process too.
Umm, what? Granted, this guy is probably not a GNOME developer and purely speculating, but those reasons don't seem logical to me and seem like pure fluff and not sufficient to remove an essential feature, but this logic underpins a lot of (mis)features of GNOME. Other examples I ran into:
It does not help that the extensions are written in JavaScript (so the shell will frequently crash on obscure JavaScript errors) and break from version to version, so you have to hope that the author has the time and energy to keep their extension up to date. The GNOME developers picked JavaScript to lower the barrier of entry for extension authoring, but I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing; maybe I'm biased because of my stance against JavaScript.
You can read more on the rationale for password prompts here:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688434
https://blogs.gnome.org/halfline/2010/10/25/system-modal-dialogs/
The reasons were not exactly compelling and the attitude from the developers were basically "won't fix". GNOME has taken the opinionated approach and does not like customization/flexibility, but sadly their UI is based on complete nonsense. Luckily, I was able to replace one of the password prompts with pinetry-curses.
I could rant on about the rest of GNOME's UI, but I suppose a lot of it is mostly preference, while the above I feel like were based on nonsensical reasons and so are legitimate misfeatures. Not a huge fan of huge icons, the Mac OS style of only having one application being at the forefront at a time, the "Show Applications" menu, etc. I prefer a traditional desktop like XFCE, but since XFCE is unlikely to have Wayland support anytime soon, this is the lesser evil. Next, I need to try KDE or Sway.