Before what? you blather on in a way that shows the whole wide world how little of worth you have to contribute? ...ooops too late. you already did.

wow, a little ass-hurt there aren't you?

or make any kind of meaningful, insightful comment when running down the work of others on the web I guess.

I'm sure the project deeply misses your contributions....

it is the point. the vast majority of users get their desktop from their distros. At the time you were talking about, KDE's "current" "stable" source code version was 4.0. 3.5 was no longer "current" in that it was in maintenance mode... fresh, feature development was occurring in the 4.0 branch. Obviously in hind sight the communication could have gone better, but 4.0 wasn't a beta or an RC or anything it was the current release of the KDE development branch. The library API had stabilized and it was ready for it's intended user base: application developers, distro packagers and early adopters.