I wish Linus Torvalds had stood-up to Lennart Poettering and made it abundantly clear GNU/Linux and specifically the Linux kernel will never support systemd and other garbage.
It's actually been the other way around. The Linux kernel has implemented lots of features for a long time which almost no one used, it wasn't until systemd when that stuff actually started to get used.
It is getting to the point where Apple Mac OS X despite its limitations and crippled nature are beginning to look like a better option. Even the Google Chromebook looks better at times. As a long-time GNU/Linux user since 1992 the current direction of GNU/Linux saddens me.
If you want a traditional UNIX system then the last thing you should look at is probably OS X. If that's what you want then OpenBSD or FreeBSD is probably a better alternative for you, or even one of the OpenSolaris descendents.
Gedit is not a massive application. It's not a massive undertaking to relearn where things are.
If vim changed all its keybindings, now that would be something. Going to a menu conveniently located in the window header bar is not unreasonably hard to do.
What gnome does right: GNOME 2 What gnome does wrong: GNOME 3
Frankly, I found GNOME 2 to be pretty awful too, due to the GNOME HIG ("No" comes before "Yes" on a dialog box? Seriously?). I don't think GNOME has gotten anything right since GNOME 1.
It's the same on Mac. Windows does it the opposite way. The idea is that the default "good" choice should always be in a easy to find position, and the lower right corner is much easier to find than the first from the left of a set of widgets.
What they did to gedit is really a disaster. One day I needed to launch some simple GTK+ app to check something I changed in configuration, so just typed "gedit" into console, saw a window and thought that client side decorations has broke. It took me a while to notice that what I saw was actually intended. UX of this app is now awful, and it's a massive downgrade, as it used to be just fine.
Why is it a downgrade? That it changed doesn't make it a downgrade by itself. You can still do the same things that you could before. Just because the menu bar and the tool bar isn't there anymore doesn't mean that the features are gone, they are still there and you may have to do some relearning. You learn a tool once, and use it many times. It's of course unfortunate that the old design wasn't perfect; maybe the new one isn't either, but the idea is that in the long run it will be and at some point you just have to change what is there even though what you had technically wasn't broken.
Don't conflate the GNOME and GNOME-derived desktop environments with Linux in general. A great deal of Linux users think that GNOME and GNOME-derived desktop environments are utter shit. They consider the GTK+ toolkit, GNOME, and the related software to be fucking disasters. No KDE developer or user would consider a text editor with a monstrosity of a UI like gedit's to be acceptable, for example.
Thankfully the loud commenters at HN and
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