It could be just apathy towards choice. I've observed this behavior among GNOME advocates as well. Some of them would rather see GNOME as the only de facto choice for a desktop environment on Linux and considering how it's installed by default on most major distributions, those words and their effect aren't far fetched.
That's what it looks like to me as well but whenever this is asserted, GNOME folks are quick to point out that they are understaffed and GNOME is a community project. I suppose we'll never know the reality.
> Despite being an even larger collection of s/w than GNOME and strongly supported by SuSE
I remember reading on HN that SuSE has people for GNOME developement but no one for KDE development. IIRC, they also ship with GNOME as the default choice.
> That shows the power of big corporate money's ability to take over even ostensibly "FOSS" software that's theoretically free but practically still dominated by a few companies
I've mentioned GNOME being similar to Android and Chromium in its nature of "look but don't touch" open source (unless you are part of their "community") but this hasn't been received well.