I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality

Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.