What were the problems or areas where you identified inefficiency? I’d agree the “settings” app is overly minimal. Personally I’d rather use the terminal for most things that wouldn’t necessarily have an obvious specific location in the GUI. In general, customisation outside the terminal leaves something to be desired, but I don’t mind how it looks by default. In rare cases I do logout and switch DE’s to Plasma but usually it’s to figure out how some function is named so that I can search up a way to do it efficiently in GNOME, then I just do that moving forward.
I would guess that the main factors are 1. your machine and 2. your use cases. On my laptop for example, I’ve found that three-finger swiping up on the touchpad to get to the task switcher is about as efficient as possible for almost all of my use cases. From there, I’m either clicking on a pinned app (including my terminal if I’ve identified I need it), clicking on one of my open tasks, or typing a few characters for the file, app or setting I want and hitting return. Including typing things like “word” to run Libreoffice Writer. In that way, my experience of GNOME’s ethos is to enable the widest range of functions possible using the fewest inputs, with the caveat that this is only the case certain machines and for people that enjoy things like gestures and hotkeys. I have a bunch of shell extensions like a clipboard history/manager, an on-screen keyboard toggle, toggle to prevent auto-sleep etc. It’s pretty much everything I want.
As a workaround, perhaps you could copypaste from the Notes part of the Steam overlay. That’s what I needed to migrate loot filters in Last Epoch. Not ideal, but hope this helps