Me and my wife both started daily driving cosmic desktop sine alpha 7. My opinion as a 10 year linux user who uses a computer daily for (programming) work and home use: I use it on nixos - the distro that finally made me stop distro hopping. I found a distro that was robust and reliable enough I stopped distro hopping. Cosmic was this for my DE or WM what ever I was using at the time. Previously I had to constantly thinker to make my DE/WM constanly adapt, add plugins to behave well for my workflow. I wanted to use keybord for most stuff but I did not want for whole DE to feel broken when I had to use a mouse. Cosmic is something built the way DE is supposed to be built. Just right. All the options user wants are just there. And most of them enabled by default. The default experience was just sooo good. Even though I used alpha version (!) i felt this DE is the most polished and the least buggy experience I ever had on linux. Because the behavior using keyboard and mouse was just so good and natural. And I did not have to change anything for it to behave this way. Even with all the bugs that come with alpha realease this fealt the most polished linux experience I had in 10 years. This never happened to me on linux. I always had to install some strange plugins for the experience to be bearable. And since I am linux enthusiast I am also very happy with their technical choices. I just love it. It is system well designed.
And for opinion of my wife who was first time linux user. She uses this DE on popos and She is conductor so she has no technical knowledge I have and she used windows her whole life. She could not believe how productive you cam be on linux. What can be achieved only using keyboard. She absolutely enjoys using her computer now.
I do not think she would feal this way if she used Gnome or Unity or KDE. Or even with window managers like i3wm or awesomewm... I think even though she used buggy alpha release she was able to increase her productivity just because she could use her keyboard more (as compared when using windows or any other DE) and she did not have to go full hacker mode with i3 or any other tilling WM.
So I recommend cosmic DE becomes the new default DE for beginners. This will not only show them linux can be used the same way as linux. But it can be used way more efficiently.
Heck. Cosmic should probably become the default DE on most distributions.