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Instead of competing against each other, Activities and Desktops just need to be put in a (correct) hierarchy.

It would be great if KDE supported:
Activities that can have a number of virtual desktops assigned to them.
Desktops that can have customized panels.

If people want to ignore Activities they can just use as many virtual desktops in their Default activity.
But other people could have Activities for Generic/Default, Work, Gaming, Video editing, etc., each with as many desktops as wanted.

And I could have what I want which is for each desktop to have a panel with customized items for its function within the activity; for example for my Default/Generic activity I have four desktops setup for Browsing, Terminal activity, Editing, and Email. Currently I have to use widgets to customise the desktops but it would be MUCH better if I could customise the panel for each and only use widgets for their intended purpose.

It looks like what you are proposing can be summed up in two items:
* per-activity desktops, in particular having a different number of desktops for each activity (this has been proposed before, but hasn't gotten much farther than that due to the apparent complexity of the change required)
* per-desktop panels (has been proposed before: viewtopic.php?f=83&t=107197)