Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.