LXDE, the "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment", is an extremely fast, performant, and energy-saving desktop environment. It maintained by an international community of developers and comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard shortcuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing.
is it? or is it more people are just kind of expecting gnome should change their approach on a dime when they've been working on stuff for a good hot minute in a manner that works for them?
people are allowed to like gnome. linux is freedom of choice. it's just that the way their dev team chooses to go about things they'll probably be the last DE to get every modern feature people have been waiting on.
GNOME's approach has always been more "spending more time adding these features but the overall level of polish of these features when they do get added is quite high"
That's basically it. They go at their own pace and prefer to implement the "best possible" solution to things, which causes a lot of conflict with those outside the gnome circle
but I think when your DE is designed to be the general face of modern desktop linux and is present at the front of most flagship distros atm that people new to linux will see when they look up "linux" that that's not inherently a bad approach
I would have to agree. Gnome also has by far the most sponsorship money guided towards it, so that would also have influence on how structured they have to be. KDE has always been able to be more experimental