I agree. Some distributions are truely different distributions of Linux. But those are different distributions of desktop environment. They are not distributing Linux itself any differently, and having to reinstall your base OS for this seems like a waste.
For user friendliness, it would be nice if those “desktop environment distributions” were instead available as packages. Like I can do “pacman -S [your desktop env package]” and it sets up the desktop environment with all its configurations. It should be much easier to do this way, for both developers and users.