They did like GNOME, but needed it to costumize it to fit their needs. And that what 'Cosmic' plugins do for GNOME. But with the newer version Gnome would have broken many of their plugins, a frequent issue with Gnome. They are currently selling products with Gnome as default.
So they could either spend resources continually keeping up with Gnome and adopting all their changes, or they could go away from Gnome. Gnome is increasingly pushing in their own direction, so this would increasingly get harder and more time consuming in the future.
Given what their costumers expect, it makes sense not to go into a totally different direction and invent something totally new and revolutionary. The new Cosmic should be reasonably close to the older Gnome based Cosmic.
They now have the freedom to evolve their DE away from Gnome, they are no longer constrained by Gnome applets (and their long term support) and I suspect in a couple years the difference to Gnome will be bigger then it is now. This is already visible, with the raw default version of newest Gnome (not the one Ubuntu or PopOS delivers) being quiet a bit different from what you get with Cosmic DE.
What would you have liked to see be different is maybe a more interesting question.
So they could either spend resources continually keeping up with Gnome and adopting all their changes, or they could go away from Gnome. Gnome is increasingly pushing in their own direction, so this would increasingly get harder and more time consuming in the future.
Given what their costumers expect, it makes sense not to go into a totally different direction and invent something totally new and revolutionary. The new Cosmic should be reasonably close to the older Gnome based Cosmic.
They now have the freedom to evolve their DE away from Gnome, they are no longer constrained by Gnome applets (and their long term support) and I suspect in a couple years the difference to Gnome will be bigger then it is now. This is already visible, with the raw default version of newest Gnome (not the one Ubuntu or PopOS delivers) being quiet a bit different from what you get with Cosmic DE.
What would you have liked to see be different is maybe a more interesting question.