from a user perspective do you prefer material design 3, GNOME style guidelines or any other style guidelines?

Definitely Material Design, it just looks so much more modern, clean, lightweight and consistent than GNOME. For me it's one of the big drawbacks of using Linux.

I love GNOME for everything except FreeCAD, KiCAD, Inkscape, and to a lesser extent GIMP, when working on a 1080p 17" laptop, on Wayland. There is far too much space taken up by the window header bars and the font line spacing is useless for managing complex trees. I always feel claustrophobic with these applications. Everything else feels fantastic with GNOME. I usually use the flatpak versions of these other apps and force them to use the built in KDE version of each app with my desktop running GNOME.

I can't stand the Gnome design. Material wins by default for me, but I do like it as well.

Personally, I am very happy with GNOME's design decisions. Most beautiful UI out there!

GNOME for me. I'm not a huge fan of material design.