most distributions dropped KDE 3 support.

They did, and they did that because their users screamed at them. Which is entirely silly to listen to, I mean, would your car dealer remove the doors if you really loudly asked for it? Hmm, maybe they would.

I'm just saying that the distros did this *against* the wishes of KDE.

I appreciate your opinion, and I even understand your point of view. Do you understand that releasing software may be something that is not just for your benefit? There are integrators, developers and others that need this release. And you should try it, you might even like it. Depending on how many features you actually use from an office suite.

Its a platform release. For developers and integrators. They want a release too, you know :)

End users are not the only reason to release software.

Thornnburg wrote;It would be nice if the KOffice site mentioned this.

Maybe you missed this in your quick reading of the linked article;
It is possible that the release of binaries for Windows and Macintosh will occur after some time if other packages that KOffice depend on need more time.

Not sure where you got the impression that a .0 version is a final "please use this for your mission critical work". That has never been true and nobody every claimed it to be the case. Remember Windows 3.0 ? I don't. I do remember 3.1

Anyway; this is a *platform* release. Distro's, integrators and developers can now get this and use it. There will be users that like it, but TFA is being brutally honest that its not for end users.
I don't understand why you seem to be upset.

Plugins and extensions as used by openoffice are quite less powerful than what firefox and koffice have. For example this is cool usecase that someone hacked already before we released; http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/hacking/musicflake1.html

Its not so much that many must find Oxygen pretty, its much more that people that don't are not whining about it like the original poster did. They just use another style that looks better to them. Frankly; saying that a theming toolkit looks ugly is kind of silly. Especially since there is a native Windows look&feel as well as a native MacOSX l&f which, well, look native.

while you can't bind functors with Qt signals, you can mix boost and Qt signals without problems so there is no limitation.

As posted elsewhere in this story the Qt APIs promote a certain design that make your application and your code easier to maintain and read.

So to answer your point 1;

• || parent-child relationships are not enough in many cases where objects are shared across multiple domains.

The parent-child relationship is there for memory management purposes. Which directly links to having an owner of an object. If your object is owned by someone else, that someone is responsible for deleting it. This is free in Qt when you use QObject. If your object is not owned by one thing but shared between many you use a QSharedData based concept which immediately makes you stop using pointers too.

This makes it absolutely clear what is what in common usage of the code and you'll notice that memory leaks or crashes due to dangling pointers become very easy to avoid.

So, you may be right Qt is not as flexible as STL. But I don't mind a bit of structure. Less rope to hang myself.

Another point that probably needs clarification;

• || Introspection has nothing to do with signals and slots

I think it does, you can't have powerful signals/slots without introspection. The huge advantage of using introspection to do connections is that you don't need a pre-compiled interface to code to. Which then avoids a lot of nastyness in C++ with library loading and linking etc.

Which makes it possible to have a GUI designer as powerful as QtDesigner, among others.

The QtUiTools is not meant to be linked against, its a library that is shipped with designer (an development-application) so its kind of odd to judge all of Qt on a bundled application. Perhaps you should try to move the classes you require from this library into QtGui. You may want to file a feature request or even do the work yourself (this post is about the repos being open!!). The tools-library you seem to want to use is not for major consumption, doesn't have binary compatibility and all that. So its great that you *can* use it, but maybe you are expecting a bit too much to get it without any investment at all ;)

by using native GTK theming that Qt supplies :) http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/05/qgtkstyle-now-part-of-qt/

the shared_ptr equivalent in Qt is QSharedPointer (surprise!) not QPointer which is something quite different. I do suggest not using shared_ptr as the Qt version has better cross-platform support and is easier to use and like most Qt things has better readability.