I didn't rant and rave about the Gnome guys though because the way I see it, they're volunteers.
Actually, they're not. Most of them are employed by Red Hat. Why RH thinks that the broken-by-design Gnome3 desktop is going to help them earn the business of corporations (Red Hat's target market), I have no idea at all; a Windows clone makes far more sense here if you want to get corporation to adopt desktop Linux, and Gnome3 doesn't make any sense at all for servers, their primary market.
I suppose you could argue that almost no Gnome users are actually paying for Red Hat, and instead are using the free Fedora distro or some other free distro like Debian which includes it, but still, it's not like the prominent Gnome devs like Jon McCan't are working on this stuff in their spare time for free.
However, it's not their responsibility to do things the way you want.
No, but they do seem to have a desire to increase their userbase, and be the most popular Linux desktop environment. They're failing horribly at those goals, so criticism is well-deserved.
These guys have an offering and they're competing with a number of others.
Competing how? It's not like desktop Linux is a multi-billion dollar market and corporations are switching en masse to desktop Linux. There are some positive stories here and there, which usually seem to involve European towns and a city or two (namely Munich), but there doesn't seem to be much money to be made in pushing desktop Linux or else we'd see a lot more companies getting involved. Yes, for mindshare they're competing with other DEs like KDE, LXDE, XCFE, etc., but they just shot themselves in the foot by greatly increasing their competition by pushing others to make not one, but two forks of Gnome in the form of MATE and CInnamon, which have won a large portion of their userbase.
If they get that wrong too many times then nobody will use their product and people will flock to the better alternatives.
That seems to be what's happening. But that doesn't mean people aren't going to sit around and talk about the whole fiasco, and point to them as an example of how not to run a successful open-source project.