Elementary's Pantheon was a breath of fresh air in the field of average user's DEs, but sadly they seem to have encountered some internal issues within the company and it's unclear if the future is bright.
Were you answering to my comment? Anyways, I don't believe that Gnome nowadays is an open project de facto -- AFAIK most of the contributors are Red Hat/IBM employees for whom it's a job.
I couldn't agree more. They have their HIG and their Adwaita design language, but the end result somehow is still subjectively off-putting for me personally, visual-wise and usage-wise. They need their Steve Jobs.
Radical no, that would require to add JIT which is planned for 3.12 AFAIK. But there are two performance improvements after release of first beta already: https://speed.python.org/