Ubuntu will lose significant audience with the switch to Gnome

I've tried to use gnome multiple times. But every time I had to come back to unity.

• Vertical space wasted (very important for me)

• Fragmented menus (really confusing)

• Broken support for applets (it couldn't show Dropbox properly without manual tinkering)

So a "state of the art" "modern" DE, welcomes new comers with manual tinkering, plugin hunting for hours, for a somewhat near-what-they-want solution. 

Canonical you need to make up your mind: you want your users to be master Linux users and solve everything by tweaking configs or you want Linux to be accessible to a new user who is still open to trying something new for a change.

Unity was ready out of the box. Gnome is not.

If you support gnome still, don't whine about people not coming to gnome. It's their choice to be lazy n dumb.