Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Installing hundreds of megabytes of Gnome packages, only to enable upgrading  KDE, is not any
more acceptable than applying the manual workarounds for this problem. 

If Kubuntu can't be upgraded independently, it should not be offered as a separate
distribution. Of course in that case users who require KDE would turn to completely different
distros, and Canonical probably doesn't want that. You can't eat your cake and have it too;
that is - you can't attract KDE users without actually supporting KDE.