I think it's not the same. Gnome 2 spawned briefly the GoneMe fork, but as soon as Gnome developers started implementing new features this fork dissapeared. Right now you have 2 Gnome forks, Mate and Cinnamon, and both of them are gaining popularity and some developers are even considering switching to another toolkit for their apps.
I don't hate Gnome 3, I used it, and worked for me (until the feature removal thing got ridiculous). The problem seems with the removal of useful features that are NOT coming back, and there were really nicely implemented stuff that got removed:
- - Twin panel Nautilus (never used it, but many people loved it)
- - Nautilus statusbar (no need to right click-> properties to see free space)
- - Decent Theme chooser (The guy at Cinnamon even improved it with a download theme feature much like KDE Does)
- - Being able to change typography settings.
- - Being able to change WM options, and startup applications (not present in .desktop files) , pretty much every configurable thing on the desktop.
- - Even if you were able to choose focus follows mouse, it wouldn't be possible to work with the current way appliations handle it's second menubar (which is a really strange way to hide settings BTW)
Also Gnome 3 it's NOT EASY, and it's NOT INTUITIVE. When presented with both desktops and a list of simple tasks new users simply cannot figure out what to do. Gnome 2 had made a lot of progress to be intuitive, gnome 3 sets those back by: hiding menus, removing descriptive text in favor of monochromatic icons (which might not be meaningful for many users).
The thing is that these criticism is taken as "oh you hate gnome", no I love gnome that's why it makes me sad to go from a very good DE to an experimental shell. This time I think gnome devs should listen a little and just put a decent settings manager with some checkboxes instead of just blindly removing features.