GNOME != Fedora

Well, "one minute" might be an exaggeration, although to an end-user it can be a bit like the sequence of events leading up to Arthur Dent finding out that his house is going to be knocked down to make way for a bypass. Even people who are forewarned might be in a position where none of the choices available are particularly appealing, and so they end up doing the most natural thing: putting off doing anything until they absolutely have to. Then it is a "one minute to the next" situation, although there are admittedly fewer excuses available to the person doing the complaining.

Of course, not everyone follows the mailing lists, and there is a class of end-user that not only won't be following the lists, but also won't have any power to dictate what they will be running in future. Those people have been mentioned a few times in discussions around this topic, presumably by people whose jobs are made more uncomfortable if they impose sudden changes on this particular class of end-user, but I can imagine that there are environments where sudden changes are imposed and the end-users just have to live with it.

All this works its way into the matter of open source adoption. If the end-users get too upset because things keep changing in ways they can't understand or didn't ask for, it becomes very easy for people to start claiming that "we would never have had this problem with Windows" even if that is a lie. Sadly, not everyone is enthusiastic about radical change, and those who don't want it don't seem to have a convenient way of supporting (or, more precisely, bankrolling) measures to avoid it.