I imagine that the reason why no one responds to this suggestion is that
the discussion is very focused: The friends of the complete Debian menu
on the one hand, and the advocates of a "newbie friendly" desktop
environment - and those newbies (I think) are generally believed to use
their computer for "home office" work, from writing a letter and web
browsing to listening to music and managing their photos.
But in fact, I think a user can both be a newbie to Linux (and even to
serious computer usage) and still have a quite focused interest, be it
"administration of a non-profit organization", a particular field of
science, game development, ...