@eeickmeyer Just my viewpoint here, but KDE is (in my experience) more lightweight than Gnome, and using KDE also allows us to use Qt app theming as well as GTK app theming.
Another reason for the KDE suggestion is the wide usage of windows, and how being familiarized with a more similar interface (you probably won’t want to include dash to panel and a menu app with gnome) would be more helpful to certain student groups in the long run.
My other slight problem with the current implementation (although this is specific) is that Firefox and certain webapps do not play well… As a Firefox user myself, this is their fault, but in the interest of compatibility with certain web apps (e.g teams) wouldn’t it be better to include a chromium fork like ungoogled-chromium or vanilla chromium builds? You are already (probably) including a snap of FF so I think it might be acceptable to include Chromium as a snap. (This brings up the point of lower-end hardware and FF being generally more ram efficient though)
These are just my questions as to the way that this is currently being designed.
Oh, and thanks for remaking edubuntu! I (as a student and sole IT person for my school a couple of years ago) had a couple Linux computers and managing and finding educational apps for them was not my favorite thing 
so I can imagine a proper education distro being extremely useful to schools and students. Sadly, my current school makes me use a Chromebook so…