[ebassi]

> A cynic might say that they decided to scrap everything and start again

and not only this cynic would be wrong, but he would also be full of crap, because it's such a trivial thing to check in the public repositories, public mailing list archives, and public bug tracking system.

but, obviously, crapping on a bunch of volunteers trying to work on the project they like is easier.

[Nursie]

That's certainly how it has looked from the outside.

Are you saying they didn't force incompatibility with Gnome 2? Or that they didn't just decide to change everything to exactly how they wanted the desktop, regardless of users?

Maybe they didn't scrap some of the underlying libraries, but the whole look, layout, interaction pattern/user flow and pretty much everything else was a total change.