[evilduck]

There are tons of people who still bitch and moan about how OSX 10.6 was the pinnacle of OSX, and that's been going on nearly 5 years. I've seen plenty of people try to make Win8 look like XP too. There's a good percentage of people who simply do not like change.

[nitrogen]

There is a difference between disliking change (ludditism) and not wanting to have one's options removed involuntarily. There's no reason at all to enjoy change for the worse -- if a new DE no longer supports one's highly efficient workflow, and doesn't provide an equally efficient alternative, it is a change for the worse.

[tux1968]

Then why don't we start architecting computer systems that respect many peoples aversion to large abrupt change, and allow them to gradually adopt new features? Instead we do these sporadic and massive code-drops that are jarring to a large segment of our users. And then we blame our users for being disgruntled.

As developers we would never accept this from the kernel, and we would complain about how it was forcing us to do massive changes to our code. Yet, we think nothing of doing this to those who have come to rely on our code.

We need a better methodology and economic model. This may well be one of the hidden benefits of SAAS where slow incremental changes fit in more easily.