Well said. Especially agree on point one. I’m not a fan of the Discovery era characterization of Section 31, but ultimately there was no reason they had to be related to this movie at all. Georgiou had plenty of personal reasons to deal with this and to have a collection of ne’er-do-wells on hand without any involvement from Starfleet / S31.
GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don’t really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.
Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.