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GNOME employs professional designers and produces consistently the worst designs in open source: kill features left and right in the name of "simplicity" then add excessive padding to what's left all in service of achieving that "ugly but useless" state that everyone loves.

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Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were IMHO the best - well designed for usability, traditional, consistent, with good guidelines. I think those prove that it can be in OSS.

However, I don't think users care that much about consistency, unfortunately (even though I think it's important aspect of design). Look at web, every website is different and it's considered a good thing by designers. There is no consistency on web and yet desktop apps struggle to compete.

I've heard many people make the same complaints you do about GNOME but I personally think it is the most polished and best designed desktop on Linux.

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