Hi,
My entirely personal take on this is that I don't really care
that much,
but I don't see a convincing case for the change. My personal opinion is
that a lot of the 'GNOME sucks and everyone's switching to Cinnamon /
MATE!' stuff in the press is inaccurate; whenever I see actual people
using Fedora, they seem to be using GNOME 3. For e.g., at FUDCon NA, I
saw a large majority of GNOME 3 systems, a few KDE systems, and I think
less than 5 people running Cinnamon or MATE. And one of those was the
MATE maintainer. :) But if somehow this change went through, I wouldn't
mind.
Reminds me a bit how the KDE 4 launch went. KDE 4.0 was horrible. It
took a few minor releases to shake out usability+stability issues (and
also adapt 3rd party apps to the new major release). Now-days people
are happy with KDE 4 and attempts to keep KDE 3 alive are pretty much
dead. But IIRC it took quite some time until the KDE 4 bashing stopped.
GMOME 3 seems to run simliar. 3.0 was pretty bad, and users rightfully
complained. Now, a few minor releases later, the most annoying stuff is
fixed and people seem[1] to be mostly happy with it. With the ongoing
finetuning I expect the motivation to keep the alternatives alive will
go away. I predict MATE will disappear first. Cinnamon probably has
higher chances to stay alive for a while, but lets see where things are
in 2-3 years ...
cheers,
Gerd
[1] /me uses KDE most of the time.