Well, they sort of did... About as much as Windows did the Start menu. They added a layer of extensions on top of all the crap you don't need to give you back the features they had removed because they decided that you weren't using your computer properly.
What I'm having trouble figuring out is how this thing can be so very sluggish and memory hungry when all they appear to have done is remove stuff the stuff Gnome 2 users were actually using. Of course, you need to spawn all of Webkit and Spidermonkey to have Gnome Shell running so that might have something to do with it. I also have to congratulate them on their ability to waste more screen space by making the interface simpler. One would expect a simpler interface to leave more room for your work, not less.
Oh well, I've decided to spend my efforts adding the few little things missing from LXDE rather than trying to tame Gnome3 back into becoming usable.