Mainly, the consensus of GNOME maintainers a long time ago was that the scope is more trouble than it’s worth:
- Overlays are even harder (`overrideScope` required).
- Referring to non-leaf packages outside the scope is annoying – `callPackage` can only inject the scope, and overriding the dependencies requires modifying the scope.
- Attributes already have `gnome-` as prefix so it would be duplicated in the scope name.
- Selection criteria are unclear – should this just be core package set?
- Upstream package status is fluent – what should we do if an app becomes a part of core, what if it gets removed?
- Main benefit was ability to update all GNOME packages at once but we still needed to do libraries like GLib or GTK manually. Nowadays we use [predicate matching on `updateScript` name](517d8466ca/maintainers/scripts/update.nix (L165)) but there is still room for improvement (e.g. adding tags).
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