I don't know if the GNOME/GTK folks will ever really understand, though. The thing is, it would be OK to have new features and even feature breaks. It's just, every GNOME release had a corresponding GTK release and a number of new things broke in GTK for it. You couldn't use a third party theme without waiting to see what was going to break next. There's no strong guarantees unlike with say, Qt, where generally speaking true API breaks are much rarer.
People probably would've had less trouble and been less upset if Gnome wasn't in a privilege position and had to just be another user in the ecosystem.
People probably would've had less trouble and been less upset if Gnome wasn't in a privilege position and had to just be another user in the ecosystem.