First off, we are not talking about Gnome OS. I personally am not a
 gnome user; I have know idea how to use it.

Also, I have /usr on a separate partition. I was against this change
initially, but after thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense.

This is the first issue we are talking about [1], and if you read it over,
you will see that gnome isn't driving this.

Regarding the case for the /usr merge, it again has nothing to do with
gnome. It is a simplification of the filesystem layout which
offers some compelling advantages [2].

As someone else said in this
thread, I have never seen a "case against the /usr merge" explaining why
it shouldn't happen.

 William

 [1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken
[2] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge