>I'm actually kind of surprised GNOME is the default for so many high profile distros despite the controversial UX.

I've never understood this, and it sometimes seems like a conspiracy. It's a very controversial DE and has gotten a lot of negative reactions for many years now, and it was so bad that different devs made not 1, but 2 forks of it: MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to all the other competing DEs out there (KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc.). But for some odd reason, all the highest-profile distros push Gnome. If they wanted to get more converts from Windows, or pitch themselves as an OS for office use that Windows users could easily switch to, you'd think they'd push KDE as the first choice, because it's the most similar.