It took me a while to figure out what you mean by "real application launcher" but I think you mean that hitting the top left corner menu (or the Windows key) launches the fullscreen window overview plus launcher and that's not enough for you? I guess the "Dash to Dock" extension is what you're after but I can't say I've ever missed it. I don't really use the keyboard for it, but every time I use a non-GNOME system I badly miss the ability to just click in the corner to manage programs, whether switching between them or launching new ones. If GNOME got rid of this I would probably stop using GNOME.
On desktop my hands are 99% of the time already in the right position for the keyboard shortcuts.
I generally quite like the out-of-the-box gnome3+ experience, it fits my use cases pretty well (when I don't have a highly tweaked custom tiling window manager setup).
It's nice to actually get choice, rather than 5 "choices" that are all chasing exactly the same style, if you prefer the XFCE or KDE experience, then that's what XFCE or KDE are for.
Proper choice would be the ability to customize that kind of thing in the DE. Having to switch the DE completely over one simple thing like this is, frankly, ridiculous.
> Having to switch the DE completely over one simple thing like this is, frankly, ridiculous.
And who is forcing you to switch DEs over one simple thing? The parent comment is merely suggesting that we use the DE that we like the most (or--I'll add--hate the least).
One simple thing can be such a major productivity blocker as to be a deal-breaker in practice.
And the situation where you have to choose between several options that all suck, and use the one that you hate the least, is exactly the one I'd rather avoid, but also the one that seems to most accurately describe the current state of software - precisely because of increasing lack of customizability and outright hostility to it.
