
To me, it's a simple dichotomy.
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.