It's not massively important, but I still think it's a good idea not to make a conclusion and then work your way back through history viewing with that lens.

GNOME was (and is as far as I know) part of GNU. The G stands for GNU -- GNU Network Object Model Environment. It actually had a CORBA ORB in it. Apart from the misguided idea of building a DE around CORBA (which, I admit, I thought was a fantastic idea at the time), the main reason for doing the work was that KDE was built on top of QT. KDE was GPL and everybody was completely happy with that part of it. The problem was that it was built on top of something that the FSF felt was incompatible with the GPL (I can't remember the exact issue).

GNOME uses the LGPL for its libraries and the GPL for its applications -- as per virtually every normal FSF project. One of the reasons there were more libraries in GNOME than you might ordinarily have was because it was intended to be a set of distributed components all talking together over TCP/IP. It's an enormous mistake, but as I am fond of saying, we're all young once.

Anyway, the point is that your notion that GNOME was somehow more pragmatic in terms of trying to avoid copyleft licenses is completely incorrect.