I'm with you - I was kind of happy with GNOME2 back in the day, but the forecoming of what was going to be GNOME3 made me jump out that ship and became a refugee in KDE.
It's a shame the Linux ports of Chrome and Firefox are written in GTK because of the reasons you mentioned. Once I heard some guy at GNOME talking about porting Firefox directly to Wayland - which sounds kind of bollocks for a pedestrian like me - but if it's possible, I hope that they succeed and Firefox can become a toolkit-agnostic web browser.
But at the same time I wonder about projects like Xfce and if they ever decide to move away from GTK, like LXDE did. I mean, a fusion between Xfce and Enlightenment would be awesome.