... and they knew it was going to happen, because of the annoyance that KDE caused when they went to KDE 4.0, and the number of people that moved from KDE to other desktop environments.

Gentle iteration (改善) is fine, and complete overhaul is fine, but the combination of killing off the old version and introduction of workflow-breaking new versions; with a supposedly community driven project ignoring many users has been very frustrating for some users.