I think Gnome is a great DE! I don't understand why you guys say Gnome is not polished, it really is. Gnome is very beautiful and clean design, even though it's not the most flexible. It looks amazing and a lot of people use it.
Arch Linux shows that most people in Arch use KDE, so KDE is more popular than Gnome in Arch I guess.
If KDE died (which will basically never happen, I will probably go to Gnome ngl.