Can you elucidate on what is "Less Powerful" about GNOME? It may be less-configurable, but less powerful? No.
Having spent years piddling around, tweaking TWM, FVWM 1, WindowMaker, GNOME 1.x, I'm glad I have a desktop that "Just works". It's not fugly, has a consistent L&F (GNOME has a HIG) and does what it should out of the box.
Incremental improvements have worked in GNOME's case. OK, so the GNOME 3.0 project (check famous wiki page) has gone nowhere, because it basically is "Start Again" (again), but we're the better for not doing it. We have stability and usability.
Try Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 or OpenSUSE 11.x live discs for a reality check. (And live Alpha disks with GNOME 2.26 are even better).
nic
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard