GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

there are people still porting gtk 1.x applications (we get emails on the gtk-* mailing lists every couple of months) 2 years after the gtk 3.0 release, and 11 years after the 2.0 release, so I would not be surprised to see applications still being ported to gtk 3 in the next 10 years. it's not an indication of anything, except that the world of ad hoc applications moves at a fairly different pace than the free and open source software.