A few years ago (ca. 2005), I was a minor contributor to the Gnome project. At the time, I remember it being my favorite desktop in terms of usability and clari

A few years ago (ca. 2005), I was a minor contributor to the Gnome project. At the time, I remember it being my favorite desktop in terms of usability and clarity, and thought it was headed in a fantastic direction to make the Linux desktop accessible for everyone and their grandmother. There was some real thought given to it in terms of what experience it should provide (for example, its Human Interface Guidelines were much more extensive than KDE's) I sort of dropped it after a while out of lack of time, and a year or two ago I looked into it again out of curiosity. The development is much more disorderly now, with no unified goals or direction. The accessibility and usability mailing lists have pretty much become irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of the core developers pay no attention to them. LXDE seems close to what Gnome used to be 5 years ago, but that's the problem- 2005 Gnome was good for 2005, but we can't be content with it in 2011.