Because we're critiquing the design, can you make nice-to-use apps following the GNOME human interface guidelines or is it rotten to the core? Is Nautilus fixable while staying within the "GNOME way?" And the answer is yes, there's plenty of examples. Elementary even makes a nice file manager following them https://github.com/elementary/files.

I'm not going to defend Nautilus or pretend it's good, I just don't care. I haven't used it in years. I do use the other GNOME apps and the DE and they're really good. GNOME's disinterest in Nautilus I think stems from my disinterest in it, what full-time Linux user uses a file manager?