but it is worth it.
Worth it for who?
I've been creating web sites since the 1990s. I still believe that a site should "work" with JavaScript disabled. I like the idea of using AJAX type technologies to just refresh a small portion of the page (eg. scroll or zoom the map), but if JavaScript is disabled clicking on the buttons should cause the whole page to load with the desired adjustment applied.
I also have been creating web sites since the 90s - I'm sorry to say that JavaScript is now just a part of what a normal website is. You can't browse the web without JavaScript anymore.
Agree.
Over the past year I've (for the first time) used Mac OS X on my laptop, I find it much less useful, and frankly much less user friendly, than Gnome 3 (and even Gnome 3 hides too much information because it assumes its users are technophobes).
One can understand Microsoft and Apple designing user interfaces primarily for technophobes, because in the modern world the majority of their users are people for whom the full power of a computer system is too complex for them to understand, much less use; and, seeing that they have in effect a duopoly, the fact that their more technically able users are not well served by their user interfaces doesn't matter, because there aren't enough of us to be a significant market, and most of us will be told what to use at work in any case.
But I really don't understand the Gnome designers' reasons for hiding so much, for making even moderately technical things so awkward. In practice, almost everyone who chooses to use Gnome is a geek. Having said that, if it really annoyed me I could either switch to something else or get under the hood and modify it, and I don't.
For me, Gnome 3 works with niggles. MacOs X is really annoying, but I can use it. Windows 7 is tolerable. Windows 10? Just let's not go there.
Then it's poor responsive design.
Seriously, there is a limit to the width of a column of text that it's comfortable to read, so for continuous text on large screen there may be reasons for having large amounts of whitespace. And, again, for continuous text, having a proportion of white space around the text is easier on the eyes. There can be good ergonomic reasons for using significant whitespace in design.
Good responsive design is hard; to have the same page layout on a two inch wide mobile phone screen as on a 24 inch monitor, and have it attractive and easy to work with on both requires a great deal of thought, and often some compromise. Making the compromises at the small end of the range doesn't work because on a very small screen pages that are not well adapted are completely unusuable, whereas if you make the compromise at the big end of the range you end up with a page that looks ugly but still works.
But the challenge of responsive design is to respond to a wide range of screen sizes and be functional and elegant on all. It's a significant challenge, and too many designers design to one fixed size or a small range of fixed sizes.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.