Xfce 4.14 released

Not quite. Desktop tech doesn't stand still. A simple window manager doesn't need to care quite so much but a desktop environment has more to cover in terms of features. Xfce developers clearly want to adopt GTK3, Wayland and many other things like supporting high definition displays to keep up. With a small team, they have to keep the releases at a pace they are good with and that is atleast in part limited by the size of a team one has access to ie) you can always go slower but you can't necessarily go faster. As a conceded in my very post here which atleast some posters seem to have missed, the userbase might well be comfortable or even appreciative of that