Story

In my opinion of course. GNOME has always, even through the drama of KDE4, seemed klunky and inferior.

I suspect it's just that KDE's early pre-GPL licensing problems gave it a bad taste in people's mouths, even though it's always been a superior environment.

So from a sports-team point of view this is pleasing, but from a real person point of view it sucks to hear that 3rd party GTK applications are being strangled.

MATE does seem like the appropriate forking point, but are those developers really interesting in taking on that big a challenge in addition to simply maintaining a UI?