Old style GNOME UI

That's great news that you will provide gnome 2.x interface access in future releases based on demand. That's actually a really important distinction because other distributions seem to blindly go "gtk3 is out! take out gtk2!" which is where the general unhappiness comes from.

Again, I don't know if I couldn't have made this more clear but my frustration is definitely not with distributions, it is *solely* aimed at the (in my opinion) irresponsible upstream developers for leaving distributions in a crutch (i.e. use gtk3 or use the suddenly abandoned and unsupported yet very stable and feature-rich gtk2).

In fact, that would be great news if you listen to users that are concerned with functionality and not use gtk3 at all when basing your distribution and continue to use gtk2. It might certainly force upstream to provide a real gnome 2.x fallback mode instead of the gimped out 2d gnome-shell fallback. It was puzzling to me when I heard because I'm still wondering how Unity on gtk3 would work with so many basic feature sets missing.

I've tested Unity on some machines and while it works great on netbooks and laptops, it's simply not something that suites my needs due to compositing ruining full screen opengl performance for other applications (unless of course there is a feature coming that disables compositing for full screen applications, be it gpu video decoding or opengl applications).

Gnome developers seem entirely disinterested in using suggestions in gnome-shell which is even further offputting. Instead of listening to user feedback to issue like "why do I have to create another screen for applications?", "why can't I change the font sizes that make my 1920x1080 minitor look like 800x600?", other workflow issues, etc. they seem to be in their own bubble. For the contrary, Unity developers have paid close attention to user feedback: netbook usage especially is great because Unity implemented a really nice vertical screen space saving function of inserting file menu's into the top menu bar.

But unless you can get gtk3/gnome3 devs to wake up and smell their suck (or you fork gtk2/gnome2 or continue to patch and support it which would be awesome), i'm very concerned as to what the gnome-based desktop experience will be years from now.