When I was at LT in Berlin last June, I passed by the Gnome booth, and they had a whiteboard out front. The headline, split down the middle was something like "Love Gnome | Hate Gnome", and there were signatures under each. I didn't stop to add my own, even though I was a KDE fan-boy at that time. I thought that the Gnome folks had a good sense of humor placing that in front of their booth. I also felt a bit embarrassed that they had to have a sense of humor about it, especially in an Open Source environment. I suppose, at that time, with Ubuntu being the 800 pound Linux distro in the room, and having Gnome as their default desktop, the Gnome folks had not only their own detractors to deal with, but, they had the Ubuntu detractors to deal with also.
What a difference a year makes. While I didn't get to LT this year, I did, out of necessity, have to try Gnome. It seems that the people who produced my favorite desktop decided to release an unfinished (but pretty) product, and many distros felt the need to include it in their releases, leaving me with many unstable workstations. Debian sid and testing, my favorite choices for desktop are up to version 4.2.4, but still this version is not stable enough for what I use a computer for.
So, I looked around for a Gnome based distro, and found Fedora 11, which contained the newest 2.26 release of Gnome. Much to my surprise and delight, I once again had a useful and stable desktop. All those years of disliking a window manager that I never really used suddenly didn't make sense. (It shouldn't have made sense to begin with.)
I guess my point to all this is, it really depends on your own needs as to how good or bad you think a window manager performs. Both KDE and Gnome have performed well for me in different incantations. I know Linux minimalists who have Flux or ICEWM as their favorites. Others don't like the bloat of KDE and Gnome and choose Xfce or LXDE.
The spirit of "Freedom of Choice" is what brought me to Linux, and it's also why I've decided to stop telling users that one app is better than another in Open Source. Don't get me wrong, if you want to know what I think of certain features, or if an app is to buggy to be useful, I'll gladly give an opinion. But, if you want a fan-boy debate, I don't think it's useful, you'll have to try each one for yourself and make up your own mind.
(And I'm not saying anyone here is guilty of fan-boyisms, just adding my story).