I actually think GNOME works best with the keyboard, they put a lot of effort into ensuring you can do everything without a mouse do to accessibility reasons. Even with a mouse, I don't hate the larger buttons. It means I don't have to be as precise with my mouse clicks.
I also think it breaking traditions is a good thing. It feels weird at first but without someone trying something new we won't see any progress. I do think they're a bit fast to do away with things they see as outdated but GNOME has a very particular design anyway that lets you get shit done when you learn it
It worked in Windows 2 and 3 and everything since. It worked in DOS since about 1990. It worked in OS/2. It works in Xfce, and up to a point in LXDE, LXQt, GNOME 1/2, MATE, Cinnamon, EDE, XPde, and lots of other Linux and xBSD GUIs. A form of it works on MacOS.
But GNOME ripped the whole UI out and has re-invented a worse version of its own. (KDE has partially kept something like it but changed half the keystrokes, which is almost worse.)
If you're blind or have some disability that stops you using a mouse, say, this makes it a TONNE more work.
Yeah. I'm actually planning on making a qwidgets based CUA desktop for BSD (and /Linux too I suppose). Despite not hating GNOME and being able to defend it we need a good unixy (IE, do one thing and do it well) desktop that doesn't try to do everything or pull in that many dependencies (it won't be based on KDEs libraries for example)
I also think it breaking traditions is a good thing. It feels weird at first but without someone trying something new we won't see any progress. I do think they're a bit fast to do away with things they see as outdated but GNOME has a very particular design anyway that lets you get shit done when you learn it