The critics are wrong

>Only unfinished and untested software is buggy and has many missing features.
Any change as big as 3.5->4.0 is bound to have lots of missing features and bugs. How about a
similar large change... KDE 2.0 was quite similar, and people were saying the same thing about
it!

>If we all ascribe x.0 software as being a waste of time, nobody would use it
A lot of people don't. x.0 releases DO have a reputation of being of lower quality than normal
because:
>at the very least it should have been tested internally much more
It's very hard to do lots of internal testing with a small team (you can often over look a bug
staring you right in the face if it's been there for a while but been low priority due to
fixing other things... or just your usage patterns, or any number of things). And again, 4.0
was supposed to be more about the libraries which were rather good at that point (there were
already a good amount of users of them).