The funniest thing happened today. For updating all the SSDs in my office, I just swap them into my workstation, 'cause it's the fastest machine I own. After updating Budgie, MATE, and Plasma SSDs, on a whim I inserted the Gnome SSD that I'd never gotten to work in my other desktop (server), and I was quite surprised when it booted all the way, and my Gnome disk is working fine.
So it wasn't an installer issue that gave me so much trouble ... it had to be the difference in video drivers. Now I know that I can at least run Gnome on this machine, so when I get time I can familiarize myself with the Gnome universe whenever I feel like it.