Even if it's "bloated", I've found KDE to be a far more usable DE than Gnome. KDE provides you with more features than you need (or thought you might need), but everything's made discoverable, so you don't mind. Gnome relies on extensions to meet the bare minimum, and they break after each update. Once you add the extensions, I think Gnome ends up more bloated than KDE. Don't know about Xfce and the other stuff.
It's not an apples to apples comparison.