"gnome-like purge" -- like that cascade of attention-deficit teenagers
But I'm a bit hopeful from some recent discussion I've seen about Gnome 3.0. See, for example, Nat's email in response to some people discussing how to manage breaking the ABI:
These sorts of insights are somehow simultaneously so painfully obvious, yet opaque to a large number of people (see above re: attention-deficit teenagers).[...] Another way to look at this which I haven't even seen considered is, "What do we need to do to create a really exciting, useful, and usable desktop environment that people love to use?" Certain things come immediately to mind: - build a baseline of useful applications that are useful, slick, fun, and work well together - make it possible and fun for other people to build additional applications that work well with our desktop and with our other applications - perform usability testing on what we've already built, identify the problems, and fix them - create compelling new and original things like what the Xgl/Luminocity/Cairo work might enable, like Beagle/Dashboard, etc. Breaking ABI, changing version numbers, "rethinking everything," etc, don't float to the top for me. [...]