The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

The key difference is that when bash3 was released the bash team didn't decide that bash4 needed to have incompatible syntax and require 3D acceleration in order to remain relevant. Instead bash4 builds on bash3 in a backwards compatible way, adding and not subtracting.

> I suspect distros would also be unhappy ... if we just stopped doing things.

How about solving new problems and not re-hashing old problems? A lack of feature density is a sign of immaturity, not a sign of usability.