Ironically this list is the wrong place to discuss a lot of the desktop simplification, thats something the Gnome team themselves have decided to do, along with building usability guidelines and human interface standards. It has proved some interesting debates and a few fallbacks (such as the emacs keys for gnome dialog editing option and sloppy focus support).
Is it also a "Gnome team" issue that eliminated the screen shooter that was in 7.3 and replaced it with a far inferior one? Can anything be done about that?
Thank you Rich