I don’t believe you. Gnome 2 was pretty much universally loved (hence the existence of Cinnamon, which is a direct descendant), and people were pissed about the tablet-oriented Gnome 3. You’d know this if you used Gnome 20 years ago.

If you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete 7 times in 2 seconds it will skip immediately

Why? You can bypass it immediately if it’s a one-off, or go update the unit configuration to have a short timeout if it’s a regular error.

More likely though, it’s something that should actually be fixed, like a misconfigured fstab. Systemd is rarely the problem here.