>I think Gnome's defaults appeal to people who don't want to work with GUIs but have to.
I feel like this would apply better to stuff like i3, IceWM, OpenBox etc. , no? Gnome is definitely for those who want to use a GUI, not get rid of it, otherwise they would use something a lot more minimalistic instead of something that eats up 1.2+ GB of ram just to launch an app.
>For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else.
But you can do that with absolutely every WM/DE though.