What were the problems or areas where you identified inefficiency? I’d agree the “settings” app is overly minimal. Personally I’d rather use the terminal for most things that wouldn’t necessarily have an obvious specific location in the GUI. In general, customisation outside the terminal leaves something to be desired, but I don’t mind how it looks by default. In rare cases I do logout and switch DE’s to Plasma but usually it’s to figure out how some function is named so that I can search up a way to do it efficiently in GNOME, then I just do that moving forward.
I would guess that the main factors are 1. your machine and 2. your use cases. On my laptop for example, I’ve found that three-finger swiping up on the touchpad to get to the task switcher is about as efficient as possible for almost all of my use cases. From there, I’m either clicking on a pinned app (including my terminal if I’ve identified I need it), clicking on one of my open tasks, or typing a few characters for the file, app or setting I want and hitting return. Including typing things like “word” to run Libreoffice Writer. In that way, my experience of GNOME’s ethos is to enable the widest range of functions possible using the fewest inputs, with the caveat that this is only the case certain machines and for people that enjoy things like gestures and hotkeys. I have a bunch of shell extensions like a clipboard history/manager, an on-screen keyboard toggle, toggle to prevent auto-sleep etc. It’s pretty much everything I want.
Mostly on a conceptual level, those things aren’t problems for me, because stuff like browsing for a file seems like an inefficient approach in most cases. I’m a simple man, I swipe up, I type a few characters, I receive. There’s no wait time for my search term to be indexed, even if I don’t know the filename I can search the filetype to get a quick filtered list. There’s no “making me use a folder”, I can access all files in all folders as well as apps or settings the same way. Hell, I can copy an emoji to my clipboard just by typing “:)” or similar. 4 inputs total including the swipe and hitting return. Definitive, repeatable, no visual identification necessary. Once you’re acclimated it feels like the liberation of being able to type without looking at the keyboard all over again.
But then, these are the preferences of someone that used to uncheck “show desktop icons” even on Windows/GNOME 2.x. Not so much to avoid clutter, I just don’t quite understand the point of the ‘visual arrangement’ as such. Either I would need to look at many things before I’m looking at the thing I want to be looking at, or I would have to memorise its location - and both of those seem like inefficient contrivances of Windows. Admittedly, my downloads folder is a pit of endlessly accumulating random useless junk. But who cares? It’s no less functional to me than when it was empty.
A few other notes:
Upon first use of 3.x I too felt that the lack of universal context menus implied less functionality as a whole. I don’t think that’s really the case though.
If I were using a mouse and also had an app/game fullscreened, then and only then would I have to shudder perform an extra keyboard input.
I guess the bottom line is, GNOME doesn’t really aim to replicate Windows.