For me it was just a back-to-basics move. It displays windows and shows you the time, volume and the current WiFi connection. It also exposes lots of settings if you do want to tweak the behaviour. Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't care about anything more.
I don't think they're changing, or planning to change anything huge any time soon either. I like that.
I think that there's a constant mismatch between how people work and how what the DE provides (with the desktop environments lagging). Years ago people looked for better DEs and shells to manage their applications easier. Now that DEs provide it finally, I have two applications left: the terminal and the browser. I can manage them myself, so I'd like my DE to just get out of the way, thank-you-very-much.
(Gnome's / unity's launchers which merge the windows, windows < 8 with splittig tabs into pseudo-windows and windows 8 with... I don't even know what it is - they just do not help anymore - at least not me)
> I have two applications left: the terminal and the browser.
Or, to put it another way: all your applications now use either a CLI metaphor, or a hypertext-document metaphor, with none of them left that use a native-GUI metaphor. So you boot into a native-GUI application manager, just so you can run emulators for the other two metaphors.
I've found going from Gnome to E is like going from MS Paint to Photoshop -- the basics are largely the same, but the latter has a ton more power-user settings and features.
(The things that I personally can't live without being the treatment of multiple desktops on multiple monitors, and the vast variety of key bindings)
Back when I first used Linux on a 486, Enlightenment provided a fancy looking window manager with similarly-themed utility apps (like a pager). What it did in 1997, with the incredibly restricted resources available, was impressive. Even on a DX4 100, though, it was just sluggish enough that it got annoying when you were trying to get work done.
Future releases added more stuff to build on top of, so there was the tantalising prospect of writing e apps and having them hardware accelerated with OpenGL (I'm sure I remember something about that). Unfortunately, the API looked unfinished, the whole project seemed to constantly be pre-alpha, and the development platform just wasn't attractive to me. I'm not sure what others thought of it, but it certainly doesn't seem to have gathered pace.
