Confused

I chose my words charefully. I said seem with a reason. I am aware of everything you think I am not.

Anyway, bringing up a kernel hacker and "lots of regressions" is not going to impress me much. Instead I rather look at GNOME 3.4 and see what we can improve. Just like GNOME 2.x.

We called gnome-panel v3 fallback mode for a reason. I know at least one distribution renamed it to "GNOME classic". That is wrong. You can get the same experience (was intended to make possible), but that was never going to stay forever. This all was communicated before GNOME 3.0 was released.

Having concrete data on how much fallback mode is used would be helpful. Fact is that it is really difficult to obtain that. I find it interesting in this light that you say "KDE hasn't recovered from KDE4". Where is the data to support this claim?

Standing at the sidelines and second guessing is cool, but bit of trust would be nice. I've been around GNOME since around the 1.4 days, same for many others involved with GNOME. Various developers returned with the plan to do GNOME 3.