I've been using vanilla GNOME on debian and it's fine to me. But, I am personally not really picky when it comes to GUIs. From what I understand with Ubuntu and Pop!_OS, those distros are somewhat interested in creating their own branding, and don't seek to upstream everything that they do. I don't think there is anything that upstream can do about that, besides maybe make it easier for them to add more patches and tweaks. Some of the upstream developers I've talked to are not particularly happy that there are so many forks, but it all comes back to the manpower issue.
>have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff.
Can you please elaborate what you mean here? If there are some bugs that are causing issues, you should consider reporting those.
>have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff.
Can you please elaborate what you mean here? If there are some bugs that are causing issues, you should consider reporting those.