When it came out it was a substantial UX regression from Gnome 2 and it took a few releases to even reach feature parity. The same thing has been seen with KDE

When it came out it was a substantial UX regression from Gnome 2 and it took a few releases to even reach feature parity. The same thing has been seen with KDE 4 and 5, Gnome 3, and how long LXQT has taken. Users hate experience regressions passionately, and will actively hate projects that depreciate or replace their workflows, sometimes for years, and sometimes forever.