Fair enough. I guess I have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't be interested to make the workflow fit better for yourself on a device you spend hours per day using.

It's just a personal thing. I try to stick to using tools that provide me the best defaults + being open source. I don't want to spend time customizing my desktop or getting overwhelmed by the amount of different choices I have available. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a beautiful and great project, it's just that, a very personal thing.

I can't agree with this more and that's the beauty of KDE. If I'm sitting down using this thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little niceties and optimizations go a long way to making me happy and productive. And it doesn't take very long to make these little tweaks.

Yes, this exactly. It's a small time investment that improves my experience significantly.

It's so straightforward you can't even switch to another window without pressing a separate button first!

The Gnome designers have apparently discovered that taskbars are attention vampires and a detriment to users.

I don't get your point. I just use two ways:

1. With mouse -> Up left corner (a.k.a hot corner) -> Click on the window I want.

2. With keyboard -> Alt + Tab -> Select the window I want.

I find that quite straight forward. Again, it's a personal thing.

No one installs Gnome on their computers.

You install a distro that includes Gnome. Did your distro choose not to package a taskbar extension? That’s a good hint your distro is not intended to be an end user distro.

99% of Gnome users have a taskbar.