I think the general reason is that it's a lot 'more' with not many benefits. Things seem to be blown up and large, almost garishly so. The window title areas ar

I think the general reason is that it's a lot 'more' with not many benefits. Things seem to be blown up and large, almost garishly so. The window title areas are large, and on systems with bad or no graphics acceleration it will complain and make you use Gnome Shell, which is ironically, in the opinion of many, nicer than Gnome 3 default UI. I think more than anything it's good old nostalgia. The applications menu is no more, instead it's a grid where you have to search for what you want or whatever. There's a massive screen overlay instead of a nice little dropdown. Multiple desktops was a good feature that's come with Gnome 3, though. If I recall, perhaps some indication of the intentions of Gnome 3 can be seen by the fact that you are prompted to drag up (really?! on a desktop?!) in order to unlock after you've entered screensaver or something. So there could be some of the same reasons why people initially disliked the Win 8 view. But mostly, Gnome 2 was just so simple and familiar, though I don't know if that's my hindsight or whatever. Point and click to what you want to run, put things on your desktop, do whatever. No BS.