I fully agree. When I first saw KDE 4.0 alpha, I was thinking "this is developer preview quality" and that's OK, but I saw the potential.
Then was the 4.1x when I started using it on daily basis, there were lots of rough edges, but that was the point, to help them out with at least bug reports and maybe some patches.
And here we are, I'm writing this from KDE 4.3 beta and this is gonna be great release!
And yes people are afraid of change (actually they're mostly afraid of everything), but I don't care that much, I love to drive innovation, even if my involvement is marginal (for now), life on cutting edge is fun!