There are times, many times, and not all times, when I personally like the level of configurability Enlightenment provides. However, I understand that not everyone prefers this level of configurability, and that many people would find the idea of having to spend as much time tweaking a desktop as I've spent on E to be absurd. For these people, GNOME exists; it's very easy to change the things people most commonly want to change, and it just gets out of the way and lets you Do Stuff. There are times when I'm a fan of that myself; the only things I've ever changed in my GNOME setup are:

\r\n\r\n
    \r\n
  • The theme.
  • \r\n
  • The wallpaper.
  • \r\n
  • The fonts.
  • \r\n
  • The set of application launchers and applets in my panel.
  • \r\n
\r\n\r\n

These things are all extremely easy to do in GNOME, and don't by any means represent the extent to which GNOME is configurable. But this leads to a useful observation: not everyone wants or needs a high level of fine-grained configurability, and often a desktop which does not offer that is just as usable, possibly more so, than a desktop which does.