I can see that you do not like KDE. Really, I suspect that the support for mobile devices has just been better with Qt than with Gnome, quite possibly stemming from Nokia buying out Qt way back when and putting a lot of investment into mobile Qt. (I think even Ubuntu Touch has based their UI on Qt, if I remember correctly.)

But yeah, there's no reason I can see why you couldn't produce a Gnome-based mobile UI if you really wanted to. And right now, Mer is crying out for some good new UI front-ends, so if you've got some free time available...