> You’re talking about Gnome as if it’s an end onto itself. But it did not appear out of thin air just to disrupt KDE’s dominance.

It did exactly this!

Gnome was created because some people didn't like the Qt license.

There had been zero technical reasons. Still people decided to start form scratch just to have a different license.

> Look at the names on the emails and posts.

Good point!

There is one very special name on that list. Someone who turned out being a Microsoft u-boot according to some very popular "conspiracy theory"…

So if you like conspiracy theories you may add "divide et impera" to the possible reasons for the existence of Gnome. ;-)

> But that’s exactly what politics means: making sure people get what they want. As opposed to everyone having what you want.

It's irrelevant what I would like to have.

The relevant question was and is what would have been best for the Linux desktop as a whole.

Do you really want to argue that the miserable split where everything gets done at least twice is a good outcome?