And it still exists, by looking at the NEWS section! That's a long grudge to hold :)

I don't know that it's a grudge per se; people liked KDE 3, so they forked it and stayed on the working thing that they liked. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Yeah it's kinda the same thing that happened to gnome 2 though it wasn't really a fork but rather a respawn in the form of cinnamon.

I was going to reply that current MATE is more "modern" that late Gnome 2 compared to "Trinity vs KDE3", but then I went to compare screenshots and I wasn't right. But in both cases I'm amused that people can get so attached to a UI paradigm that they rather fork it and spend time and effort keeping it alive. It doesn't really click with me, but I admire the effort.

I think you're thinking of MATE. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3.