I can't say that I agree with you as far as the Apple stuff, but as a long time Gnome user, I agree with you 100% about Gnome. I loved Gnome 2, but even after all these years Gnome 3 has not grown on me. I'm actually running it on my main desktop PC right now so it's not for lack of trying. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur but I'd take some Gnome 2 with Compiz over this mess of a desktop environment even still.
It's been working great for me. What do you need it to do? Mine is just like the MacOS dock: it has shortcuts on the left side and opened programs on the right side.
You can create a MacOS style top panel in KDE, and then add whatever widgets you want to it. It's called an "application menu bar". Just right-click on the desktop, then choose Application Menu Bar from the Add Panel menu.
On Linux I had an extra panel that didn’t feel like it was part of the OS, it felt more like this extra thing of mostly wasted space, so I could pretend the desktop environment was designed differently than it actually was. It didn’t feel much different than running a dock app on Windows, and still needing the start menu and taskbar.
You can add any widget to any panel. There's no need for wasted space, because you can move stuff around as much as you want.
I use two panels, because adding additional widgets to my dock makes it too cluttered. So, I have a dock at the bottom of the screen, and another panel on the left-hand side with an application menu (which includes Restart, Shutdown, Lock, etc.), a clock, and a system tray (which handles mounting/unmounting drives, Bluetooth connections, volume, and so on). They're both set to "auto-hide" visibility so that they're out of the way when I'm not using them.