On the other things: the GUI we have (GNOME, for Fedora Workstation) has really settled down in core design from how it was a few years ago, with more room for the polish you're looking for. (Despite the superficial appearance as a tablet interface, GNOME is actually pretty awesome from the keyboard, and I actually think of it as a keyboard-primary UI, at least for how _I_ use it.
GNOME has made impressive technological leaps forward but the shell design and desktop workflow model haven't advanced at the same pace. What if Fedora Workstation had a unique desktop shell like Elementary OS and Ubuntu's Unity? Maybe something more traditional like the macOS desktop environment that had similar concepts but built with GNOME technology and Wayland. Sometimes superficial appearances are a much bigger factor than we like to acknowledge in the success of platforms.
It's amazing that macOS a technologically backward platform has managed to attract a large following among the engineering community because of it's great desktop environment.
It's not really that surprising. Osx is really good, and has well designed subsystems that allow developers to actually achieve their designs. Their toolkit is also absolutely first class (though not quite the same thing, I've been impressed with some of the recent work that always to be turning gtk+ into a truly modern toolkit).
The osx shell, while "pretty" is actually really powerful and they expose a great deal more functionality than, for instance, GNOME, all while not having to drop into terminal.
Frankly, I've never understood why people think osx is, overall, technically inferior, especially for the desktop user. For example, while osx doesn't have proper asynchronous kernel support (and neither does Linux, incidentally) they've provided a nice solution that can mimic it more effectively than what you typically see on Linux DE's. This is because mac programmers are able to count on excellent frameworks/libraries (in this case, gcd) that let them more easily achieve something that certainly can be done on, say, Linux, but requires a lot more stack knowledge.
Now, why should a desktop user (say, a developer/engineer/scientist) move to Linux? Will it let them do their work more quickly (or easily)? Does it support more of the applications they need and provide seamless support for sharing arbitrary information to their colleagues (without having to context switch to email, or the like)? Is it even more enjoyable to use (much tougher to say, but I've been really impressed with how nice osx is after having been so often told that "it's pretty but vacuous"---i don't know that I could've been more shocked when I found out how wrong that was)?
Personally, this whole thing looks to be part of the cyclic existential crisis that the community goes through. Lots of talk happens, even sometimes plans are made, but next year you find yourself immersed in this same conversation.
There are some pretty obvious changes that might help but shibboleths aren't usually part of these discussions within the community.