KDE struggles with feature requests

First, I do certainly agree that they shouldn't have called it 4.0, or at least, they should have called it "developers release" or something like that, but that's all history and continuing to discuss and complain about that 1½ year later is stupid and not exactly productive IMHO.

The KDE developers choose to do a "big bang" because there was many too big problems with the current release. I'm no expert but sometimes I do believe that is the best option if you really want to move forward and get something that's considerably better (eventually). Apple's OS X is a good example of that. Granted, they've handled it better than KDE, but that's not really THAT surprising.

In regards to Gnome, the question is whether they at some point will need to do the same, but I could imagine they would have to do some major surgery as well at some point. Hopefully they'll have learnt from KDE's mistakes.