Do they actually not like their users?

So, Gnome's answer for removing obvious features is to go to gconf-editor, but this doesn't
appear to be in the menu, so one would have to dig to find this, just so they can set the
desktop background? And while on this rant, who would ever look for desktop settings in a file
manager, and why would you make the file manager the system settings manager? Isn't that the
job for a system settings manager and not a file manager? I run Linux Mint, so it's a Ubuntu
clone (on steriods). I use KDE, simply because everything is just too hard to do in Gnome, for
my taste. When I want to change something, I want to be able to do it intuitively, not by
having to google for it. Life is complicated enough without having to make it more so. GUIs
should be painless and made for the simpleminded. Not that KDE is all that, there are
certainly things that are hard to do in KDE, but it's far superior to Gnome. I even opened a
Gnome desktop to test changing the background. There was a way to do it from a right click on
the desktop (since I didn't disable Nautilus), but something running in the background made
the window come up so slowly, and every other tab (fonts, animation, etc) in the configuration
screen refused to open. Gnome is a real dog on this <1 year old laptop, but to be fair it was
the third X session running, but when I switch it to KDE it runs fine. I see comments in here
about disabling things in Gnome to get the speed performance back. 
Sorry, that's the wrong approach. 

It seems Gnome has taken all the bad ideas from Windows and implemented them, only making them
worse. Of course, our Grumpy editor has made his life harder by his own action, which any
normal person would have probably thought was innocuous. Who'd a thunk it? Remove a file
manager and remove your desktop!? I'll bet adding back Nautilus won't easily fix those
problems though, and probably the only way to properly fix removing Nautilus is to re-install
the OS? Wow, just like Windows. Great job, Gnome guys!!!

So my advice to you Grumpy Editor is switch to KDE, it's not perfect but I like it.