> ... because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster.

I totally hated that whole mess. It almost ruined KDE for me. The real disaster there wasn't that KDE released v4 prematurely, but that they didn't make it crystal clear to the distro maintainers (and end-users) that it was not ready for "prime time" use yet (it was basically "pre-release"/alpha quality), and the major distros of the time jumped on making it the default (forced it on everyone) when it was still basically utterly broken compared to the prior versions of KDE (which had become overall quite solid and reliable by that point).

It's all post-hoc rationalisation. They got caught in their own hype and released low-quality code. They fucked up, that's all, and it's a bit embarrassing that they won't admit it.