> After a few releases of Gnome 2, the loud complainers were silently using Gnome 2...
How did you know that given that they were silent about it? I was among those who used Gnome 1 and did not like Gnome 2. I could never start to use it comfortably and silently switched to KDE in the end. I am sure a lot people have silently switched to another DE as well.