IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)