Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Since the thread uses very vague terms it is hard to judge and conflicting statements make it even worse.

"rewrite" would indicate that the item in question is KDE's desktop shell, which was rewritten using Plasma technologies.

"across the board", on the other hand, sounds more like referring to KDE's wide range of products, which, contradictingly, have mostly not been rewritten, just simply ported.

Since the comment you are replying to sounds like it is addressing the first option (desktop), I think a more accurate assessment would be that the rewrite was necessary because of the old code base having reached an unmaintainable state.

While the comment asserts that regular users would have not run into any problems, reality looked very different back then.

Given the option of rewriting the same thing again or trying something new, the developers option for the latter.

It is debatable whether that second choice was the best possible or whether rewriting KDesktop and Kicker from scratch would have yielded better results.

But I think it is important to understand that the rewrite itself of at least some of the involved desktop components was inevitable unless one wanted to face dropping the desktop shell product completely after a couple of months of increasingly painful maintenance work.