I'm sorry, compared to standard GNOME (v2, v3 can join Unity on the junkpile IMAO) or KDE, Unity is crap, and I am hardly alone in that opinion.
Perhaps certain open source developers just suck at taking any kind of criticism? That's sure what these moves feel like.
I would bet large sums of money we're going to see something distasteful come of this, along the lines of further intrusive desktop advertising ala Amazon Lens.
Maybe if you would start listening to the community more when there's a large outcry (amazon lens, unity, gnome 3, etc etc etc) there would be fewer people who feel they are "entitled" to a desktop experience that doesn't suck!