I probably should give it another try some point soon. I think last I tried was 2022. And every significant update several addons would break for days and weeks.

well, it might have gotten more stable, but when I tried it on Nyarch, it has only gotten more gnomish in the intervening time.

Admittedly, Nyarch probably didn't help it look more "serious" but I think the general design principles of gnome were similar to when I installed it accidentally on debian 13.