> if you tell people that ‘hey, any part of this OS is replaceable and should still work’ you have essentially created a testing matrix for yourself of infinite

> if you tell people that ‘hey, any part of this OS is replaceable and should still work’ you have essentially created a testing matrix for yourself of infinite size Fair enough. But between telling people that any part of the OS is replaceable and telling people, for example, that Gnome can be replaced with XFCE, there's a world of difference in terms of the support and testing effort required. It's practically possible to support more than one possibility for some default settings, even if supporting all possible combinations isn't practically possible. That said, the Fedora Workstation team is of course free to support whatever it chooses. Just quibbling with the reasons given, not the choice itself.