> This modularity prevents to create a solid user experience in various ways because everything needs to be compatible with random components that cannot even be tested properly.
I cannot believe I am reading this on GNOME central mail list! Is this the same GNOME that helped to improve WM standards (to NETWM and beyond) so that people could use different WMs? Is it the same GNOME that helped to establish freedesktop.org with all those cross-DE standards? Are you implicitly saying that GNOME does not believe in cross-DE standards anymore? GNOME already effectively dropped cross-DE systray, right? Now, WM mobility is gone. What's next, dare I ask?
I feel somewhat uncomfortable to tell you that, but people invented standards exactly for that purpose - not to test everything with everything, but just to make sure things work together because they follow standards. And, if X does not work with Y - it is either because X does not follow standard S, or Y does not follow it - or there is some gap in S that can (and should) be fixed. That's the way things always worked in Unix world, that what makes unix great, what makes freedesktop.org important (perhaps even more important than GNOME, from some POV).
One of the strongest selling points of Linux desktop was the freedom of choice. Not only "DE1 or DE2" but "component1 or component2". While GNOME2 provided reasonably consistent experience out of the box, it allowed people to change things as they wanted - and it was reasonably simple (no patching, thanks). For example, many users would just throw GNOME out of the window if that window could not be managed by their favorite tiling window manager.
I realize that at this stage GNOME3 (3.0) is not going to be flexible in this aspect. Not enough resources and such. But perhaps GNOME could admit that was a mistake - and express the intension to fix it in 3.2/3.4/... Now that nearly everybody is agree that applets are useful and would be nice to have around, perhaps the position on the WM could be adjusted somehow as well?
Sergey