I agree that developers can make whatever decision they see fit about their project.
Notwithstanding the above, there is a minimum of respect for the community, which is what gives sustainability to the project.
It is true that there have been distributions whose developers have decided to make changes, however, they have done it in a transparent way, publishing in the main part of their web page the reasons that led them to make this decision. Here everything is different, half hidden; besides the arguments they give are not very convincing, the Gnome desktop is heavy, it does not compare with XFCE which is much lighter.
I have installed Zorin Os Core on an old laptop with limited resources and it barely runs, even though I have disabled all the inherent features, such as multitasking and cube.
I think it's more of a resource problem (you have to consider how long it took them to release the current version).
One of the things I have always criticized the Zorin brothers for is the lack of timely communication to their community. We never know when the new version will be released, what aspects it will include, etc.
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