My rule for desktop environments is that if I can’t make it look like GNOME2 from the early 2000s then it’s trash and unusable.
Top bar is menu, application window list, systray, clock, maybe a logout button. Bottom bar is for quick launchers and a desktop switcher I’ll never use
Still can’t explain why GNOME3 looks like the fever death dream of the right side of someone’s freshly bisected corpus callosum.