I've been seeing this development but I had no idea that the GNOME developers actually think like this Allan Day guy.
And this brand talk is really silly in this context.

For example, I was not happy with the Unity desktop when it came as the new alternative to Ubuntu, and actually used quite long time the old UI. I don't really get this trend of making desktop 'look like a handheld device' as the functionality does not get any better this way.

Now in the newer releases it is not any more so easy to enable the old desktop look, it's not even in default repositories any longer but rather you have to add mate ppa and install it from there

It used to be so that GNOME was the free alternative to the evil KDE (which I never liked, really) but it has turned sour lately.