>Well, given that nothing else became a standard and their are a tad bit of people unhappy with Gnome 3,

Nah, that flag has flown. The time has passed where I would've moved to E17. I've since gone past that on to XMonad.

I think for the most part, the people that are unhappy with Gnome 3 aren't looking for something new: they just want Gnome 2.

I sure don't. Various areas like the GNOME panel were visibly crutchy and full of historical assumptions/design. This was fixed with GNOME 3 but other areas were/are suffering various levels of undue abuse. If I were looking for GNOME 2 I'd be using XFCE instead (as many people around me are). In place I use OSX — both a more solid foundation and more configurable than GNOME3 — and Awesome/Arch — striving to drop all/most GTK and QT dependencies.

I don't think so. There are a lot of problems with Gnome 3, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of problems with Gnome 2 as well.