Spot on. Gnome is designed for non-existent user. All the while, worse than ignoring, denying actually existing user that have since moved on. Very sad story.
But "suck" is some subjective thing, you will find a giant number of GNOME fans that will tell you how great GNOME is, how intuitive it is, and how you just need to give up your own preferences and embrace their UX guru ideas and it will not suck.
It seems that many people are in the "I don't want to think for myself camp" . unfortunately people in my family are also in that camp, never question if maybe there is a way to customize things to make the software more comfortable, they bend their body and minds, causing even distress to follow the defaults.
Something that obviously suck for us is normal for a GNOME user, in GNOME land there is only 1 way of working and if you don't like it you are asked to move on. many tried but you can't change those guys minds this is why there are tons of GNOME forks and probably no KDE fork.
You shouldn't need to "think for yourself" as a prerequisite to have usable tools. Your thinking energy is much better spent solving original problems or channeling your creativity.
Personally - I think KDE 3.5 (yes I'm that old) was near perfect. As of 4.x, they were prioritising adding the ability to freely hand-rotate desktop widgets (who the actual f8ck wants a skewed widget!?) over performance and stability. I could live with a useless feature, but I couldn't continue to run it on a computer with 256MB of memory, which was all I could afford back then. I can't remember what I switched to at the time, but I never came back.
>You shouldn't need to "think for yourself" as a prerequisite to have usable tools
This is not true, we are not all the same. For example my eyes are bad, and one is worse, so I prefer one side of the screen more, I want to put my important stuff like notifications on my good side, I do not need a pretend UX guru to tell me how to have my notifications and hard code them. I also prefer to change the keyboard layout around so I can do most used keyboard shortcuts comfortable with just my left hand. I don't care that the majority things the keyboard layout should look like, I am more comfortable in my way where a GNOME user will not even consider that it could be possible to customize the keyboard layout or change keyboard shortcuts, some big ego dude decided for them.
Let's assume you are right and defaults could be good for 99% but IMO are great only for 40%, I want great, not good or OK, but I don't want to force my preference on others , just wish others won't remove functionality because it is used by less then 50%.
EDIT: I think I might have misunderstood your point and my reply was offtopic,
I assume that GNOME big EGO designer checks the touchspeed setting on his laptop, decides what is best for him and hardcodes it in, in their mind GNOME is usable and if you somehow disagree they will tell you to move on, they will never admit anything, they want to push out all the people that disagree with their vision and keep only the ones on the exact sam page with them on all the possible points.
This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.