I love having a decent looking default theme rather than a forest of ugly ones as well. However, the default theme is nowhere near pretty, or even usable on smaller screen sizes. I have a 10" netbook that runs Gnome like a dream, but there is so much wasted space due to the size of the panel and further in the size of title bars. Considering they default to one button on it, there is no reason it should be as large as it is.

That said I still use Gnome3, and I donate to theme developers who make themes that make the desktop more usable to me.