Can you elucidate on what is "Less Powerful" about GNOME? It may be less-configurable, but less powerful? No.
Having spent years piddling around, tweaking TWM, FVWM 1, WindowMaker, GNOME 1.x, I'm glad I have a desktop that "Just works". It's not fugly, has a consistent L&F (GNOME has a HIG) and does what it should out of the box.
Incremental improvements have worked in GNOME's case. OK, so the GNOME 3.0 project (check famous wiki page) has gone nowhere, because it basically is "Start Again" (again), but we're the better for not doing it. We have stability and usability.
Try Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 or OpenSUSE 11.x live discs for a reality check. (And live Alpha disks with GNOME 2.26 are even better).
nic
This system rocks until you buy APress, Manning or A.N.Other publisher.
So, my Sun Java books go with the Purple books, my Oracle books are all together and my Manning books all sit together, too, because it looks nice.
So an Aesthetic order? Hmm.
With the rise in popularity of Linux-based netbooks (many of which come with FF2.0) how can 2.0 be EOLd?
I know no-one wants to support old crufty software (especially for free...) but, there are many of real users out there who will have to stay with 2.0.
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.