No, gnome3 isn’t “perfect”. I’m personally back to openbox in my neverending quest to maximize netbook performance. But you have to at least give the devs credit for trying something new. Because that’s what they did, and not even being willing to test it out (especially if you’re already a faithful gnome user) is pretty much saying you can’t handle change and would prefer it if your computer always appeared exactly the  way it did in 1995.

 
Yes, trying something radically different will mean changing your habits. It’s not the same as upgrades that minutely increase speed or efficiency. I believe that an unwillingness to change is holding us back. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading about cyborgs for one of my papers lately*, but maybe changing one’s habits is necessary to progress closer to a sublime computing experience? It’s at least worth a shot. I suspect that there is something out there that would be at least as good as panels.

*in the sense that cyborgs were sort of conceived of as an alternative to terra-forming space, rather than change the environment, change the astronauts so that they can survive in it