Some interesting GNOME Shell extensions

This is the answer I find the most ironic. The philosophy from Gnome 1.4 to Gnome 2 was "simplify; kill off all options; if we keep an options, there must be a very good reason and not just a single person complaining". The options that were removed were removed from gconf as well since, "all options that are available require more ongoing maintenance" Slowly over the life of Gnome 2, some options reappeared as people made better arguments for why they should exist.

Now with Gnome 3, it appears to be: kill off the user configurable options; hide them in gconf where they are virtually undiscoverable to normal users; but we will keep the code maintenance burden around.

Anybody else think there has been a large scale replacement of maintainers between the Gnome 2 transition and the GNome 3 transition?

All I can say is that at some point I switched from Gnome 2 to KDE3. When KDE4 was a disaster that tried to change the desktop metaphor I switched away to XFCE. No idea where I would go if XFCE follows up with a major change in the desktop metaphor.