Yeah, that was weird. I remember that as the only time I actually felt that Linux had a decent shot at the Desktop. New money had rolled on to the scene with a coherent vision, started fixing a lot of the suck, and quickly became the predominant distribution.
Then something happened and Canonical went crazy with NIH and mobile obsession. Then they tried to monetize in a stupid way.
Let's stop with the NIH blaming, Canonical could not change GNOME direction, so they had no choice, if you remember Canonical wanted to add some fancy scrollbars in GTK but it was rejected, later when GNOME wanted same fancy scrollbars GTK accepted them.
I am a KDE user and I watched this from the side sao I am not invested in any camp, what we see is that when a meinteiner with big ego controls a project (it happened with KDE Plasma too) you can't bring any improvement that the meinteiner does not agree with.
Then something happened and Canonical went crazy with NIH and mobile obsession. Then they tried to monetize in a stupid way.