The thing with DE is that you can very easily try them all. And you should! I actually like Gnome 3, a lot. It's a desktop environment that's uniquely linux, that moves beyond the usual windows 95 paradigm and it's stylish and well thought-out. I think much of the negativity it gets is because they made a very big change from the previous version, and its just not what people who used the previous version wanted. Also, i3 is just great, especially if you use the command line a lot (yes, I know it's not a DE, but really whatever. It serves the same function).
I really liked Gnome 3, but found that it could be slow and buggy, even on my brand-new medium-end desktop.
I agreed what you said about Gnome 3, it's all fine. But choosing DE for a newbie or a medium level user can be problematic because there are many out there. The better and faster way is to analyse your needs and read such articles.