My gripe is not with Gnome removing features that are useless, but with Gnome removing features that are useful just to influence user behaviour.
The case I have in mind is the lack of an option to leave the screen on even when inactive for a long time, because the developers want to discourage that power usage pattern (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647828). Typically users do not need to leave a screen always on, so the default behaviour should not be to leave the screen always on, but if a user needs to leave a screen always on for whatever reason, why should they have to install an extension?
It is the Gnome designers' job to design the system to their taste, but it is not their job to try to influence the users.
AbiWord was fairly close to this, and I believe it was part of Gnome Office at one point (along with Gnumeric, which was a pretty good spreadsheet app for a while).
The case I have in mind is the lack of an option to leave the screen on even when inactive for a long time, because the developers want to discourage that power usage pattern (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647828). Typically users do not need to leave a screen always on, so the default behaviour should not be to leave the screen always on, but if a user needs to leave a screen always on for whatever reason, why should they have to install an extension?
It is the Gnome designers' job to design the system to their taste, but it is not their job to try to influence the users.