I definitely get what you mean, and sometimes agree, but tbh I'm glad Gnome is an option for those who want a DE that is uncompromisingly UX-focused and straight up won't accept changes until they're damn sure it'll be production-ready.

And while they've been relatively slow in getting adaptive refresh working, they've been very quick with some other things. Idk why it took them this long to sort out the cursor occasionally becoming out of sync with displayed content's refresh rate, but there must be a reason for it.

Gnome was at the forefront with Wayland, PulseAudio, they've been the biggest pusher of Portals, pretty much all of their GTK4 apps have been designed to also be compatible with mobile devices. Accessibility features on Gnome are also pretty great for a Linux DE.

As a general rule, I'd say their development process works well, despite there being the occasional holdup.

And while Plasma obviously isn't nearly as bug-free as Gnome, it's come a long way since the Plasma 4/early Plasma 5 days. I still don't feel I can depend on it the same as I could for Gnome or Cinnamon (compositor crashes bringing down all open apps is a big issue in particular - and is finally due to be fixed in Plasma 6), but don't underestimate their progress — since like 5.15/5.16 they've improved leaps and bounds.

And with 6 it looks like they've learned from the mistakes of 4 and 5's launches.