I'm allways surprised when people seem to find Gnome is compelling. 
I never found it compelling. A dozen years ago I moved to KDE, because 
Gnome was so ugly. Later I turned back to Gnome when KDE went crazy; 
then Gnome-3 went mental also and I switched to Gnome-2, and then Xfce4. 
My children told me recently the Linux we have at home seems much 
simpler than those of some of their friends. I'm not sure they consider 
this a compliment, but I'm happy with it because simplicity is a quality 
for me and the complexity of other DEs is neither usefull nor pleasant, 
just exasperating.

     I admit that this is a purely personnal preference, but since Gnome 
people have committed themselves to make their DE everyday more 
entangled with Systemd, it will take a similar team and commitment to 
disentangle it on the long term. And, some day it will loose all sense 
because the core motivation for having Gnome will lay in this very 
entanglement.

     Didier