GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

From what I can tell the development community for MATE is quite small, certainly compared to XFCE's. I don't have as a good of a sense of the number of developers working on Cinnamon. Can anyone comment how the viability of the Gnome 2 forks in general as far as development community?

But in any case, that's why I've been recommending XFCE; that and the fact that it's available on all of the major distributions, which is not necessarily true for the Gnome 2 forks.