When I tried KDE, it was about the time they made these radical changes,
I couldn't make head nor tail of it so I went back to Gnome. Then I
found Avant (AWN) and I use that almost exclusively now, I've cut my
Gnome panels down to a minimum (AWN doesn't quite stand on its own,
unfortunately). Mind you I'd long abandoned the Windows desktop in
favour of QuickLaunch and I disable it now (when I'm forced to use
Windows). I wish I could switch off the Ubuntu desktop, just have a nice
wallpaper with no icons.

So as long as I can still strip it bare and run AWN I don't much mind
what happens to Gnome.