That's their justification, but put a non-technical user in front of a gnome system and you will find nothing but confusion. It doesn't operate like any other OS GUI, nor is it intuitive or discoverable, nor does it have feature parity. They must be designing gnome for someone, but I don't know who.
I don't know, last time I tried stock Ubuntu I found it to be pretty similar to current macOS with the launchpad and mission control. In any case, the answer to those problems you're describing would be more and more breaking changes, not less.
