Red Hat discloses RHEL roadmap (TechTarget)

That is the usual rationale cited for the 4.0 release but it is clear that many users didn't expect that and 4.0 release announcement didn't mention it either. That was one of the reasons for the initial backlash and 4.1 announcement did include such a note. Chalk it up to lesson learned.

To be fair, only the most enthusiastic had KDE 4.0 pushed onto them. Indeed, some of us have avoided KDE 4.x almost completely until now. Apparently, KDE 4.x is quite usable provided that one is prepared to adjust it somewhat to behave as one might expect.

As I pointed out elsewhere, perhaps the most significant problem for the KDE and GNOME developers is not what these environments can do or support but how they are delivered to users by default, especially when those users expect something else and are not willing to experience a learning curve for the sake of it (maybe because they're only getting version upgrades infrequently, not at every opportunity, and thus experience the resulting big paradigm change as a sudden shock).

Still, I think it is regrettable that only as various environments reach their x.7 release or so (where x is the controversial major version number) are they regarded as picking up from where the previous major version series left off.