Re: It does suck
I've found the current Gnome desktop annoying. Seems to want to be different just because. I endured it at my last client because the "official" download site on their LAN didn't include any desktop other than Gnome for our Linux VMs.
I really like the KDE Activities feature (earlier versions of it were "meh" at best). Having customized menus for different activities has turned out to be very useful. As is the ability to, once again, assign different background to each activity after losing that with KDE's virtual desktops.
To each his own, I guess.