The critics are right

>KDE 4 is seriously dumbed down by design. Vista already 
>showed that dumbing down is not overall a successful 
>strategy, even if a small number of people prefer it.

Personally, GNOME/GTK already showed me that was a horrible strategy (and Vista really didn't
dumb it down anymore than XP). And thats not *by design*, thats *they haven't reimplemented
those features yet*. The *only* case I can think of where they've refused to add a
configuration option is the whole cashew thing, and thats because the Plasma developers wanted
a solution and not what was a work around in their eyes.

>KDE 4 is unstable.
Hardly a direction, and early KDE 3 releases were unstable as well. Large churn always results
in instability.

>KDE 4 attempted to dictate that everyone should 
>have a magic search plasmoid desktop with no 
>ability to save files there. That doesn't fly where 
>KDE is used by unsophisticated office workers.
Plasma's method of handling icons in 4.0 sucked pretty bad (every icon was a plasmoid), which
was quite unfortunate. Plasma in 4.1 includes Folderview, which will give you most everything
you had in 3.5 (a place to save files with no fuss). You can even have multiple foldiers on
your desktop at once, you can even watch *folders on a remote system, half way across the
world with no mount magic*. You'll also be able to use Nepomuk and do very nice things.
Folderview will offer you everything you had in 3.5, but FAR more flexible. It'll have it's
problems like all new things, but they'll be worked out as the problems are found.

>KDE 4 attempted to dumb down the file manager with Dolphin.
Konqueror is still there. Dolphin offers most of the *file management* functionality that
Konqueror had, and the Dolphin developers have added many new things, but they just want to
focus on file management without having to deal with also be a web browser/pdf viewer/movie
player/audio player/text viewer/etc. Konqueror had gotten quite hard to maintain due to all
the complexities as well, it was pretty much unmaintained for large periods of time AFAIK as
well.

>KDE 4's new start menu is an insane joke.
There were ~3 different menus being developed and only one was near ready for 4.0. They could
have delayed the *entire* release until the others were ready... but you can't really claim
that the start menu is a show stopper for the entire environment.

>KDE 4's panel is not yet able to do 10% of what Kicker has been doing for me in KDE 3.5.
Unless theres FAR more functionality in Kicker than I ever used, thats quite the hyperbole.
Kicker did have more functionality and configurability, but Kicker was also a nightmare to
maintain that NO ONE wanted to touch (the only person maintaining it AFAIK was the person that
decided to ditch Kicker and make Plasma...).

None of those things you raised were the /direction/ KDE 4 was being taken, but issues with
the 4.0 release that were not design decisions but simply you can't have perfection with the
first release.

>Now you may say that the KDE team is slowly changing it's mind on a lot of these issues
I don't think the team decided about 4 series that they wanted it to be lacking features,
unstable, no icons, a crappy file manager, a bad start menu, or a crappy panel. And I doubt
you could seriously believe that, those were *design decisions*, but problems with the 4.0
/release/ (and remember, 4.0 isn't 4, but just the VERY beginning).

>re-enabling the old KDE menu
AFAIK, this wasn't ready in time for 4.0.0 and there was no one working on it either.

>restoring parts of Konqueror
Restoring? Nothing was removed. Hell, new features (re-opening old tabs, better session
handling) are being added just for Konqueror (not even counting the extra things it got from
Dolphin).

>telling us that panel may be ready for prime time in 4.3
I don't remember anyone saying anything about 4.3... some things the Plamsa developers have
said won't be ready until 4.2 (background painting for full screen folderviews), but the
Plasma developers have also said they're wanting to be able to make releases more often, that
in their current state the release model that KDE uses is too long.

>allowing people to have folder desktops instead of search desktops 
Icons were allowed on the desktop since 4.0.0, in fact the icons were based off the Desktop
folder. 'Search desktops' are actually a *new* thing that Folderview will be capable of (among
many other whiz-bang features).

>You would be wrong, however, if you suppose that the 
>harm was undone due to people like you praising every 
>design flaw in KDE 4.
I don't really think something that has nothing to do with the design could be a design flaw.
KDE 4.0.0 being unstable is hardly a design flaw, as are the others.

>The harm is being undone due to people (including 
>KDE developers) aggressively pointing out just how 
>bad and misguided KDE 4 had become.
KDE 4 wasn't misguided from a developer point of view *at all*. We could argue about whether
there were marketing/communication issues about what to expect from KDE 4.0 vs a mature KDE 4
desktop, but that'd be completely pointless. Similar things about KDE 4 were said about KDE 2
(which was also a major change), but KDE 2 enabled KDE 3.5.9 to exist, the technologies
created then are what powers the best desktop environment out there.

Is the KDE 4 series currently better than the KDE 3 series? No, but it has the potential to
*greatly* surprass 3 with some time.