@vkc It may not be well articulated, but in at least some cases I think the upset is not with the fact that GNOME might be doing something different, but what kinds of effects that will have on the rest of the ecosystem.

I'm not sure GNOME has the kind of hegemony that it had for a while there in the mid-to-late 2000s, so maybe this isn't practically as much of an issue any more, but I think it does make a lot of people (myself included) shy when GNOME does (subjectively) objectionable things.

@vkc GNOME does have a fairly long history of being the tail that wags the dog; a lot of the freedesktop.org stuff that made desktop environments objectively worse in measurable ways ... came from GNOME, and was rammed through because it had the funding and distro backing. For example, it used to be that if you asked for a 12 pt font, you got a font that was actually 12/72 of an inch baseline spacing on your actual monitor ... but now you don't, and that's absolutely on GNOME.