dyingkneepad

The author also links to a similar assessment in the Gnome community, which I find really interesting.

With Gnome we can see the interest went down after Gnome 3 was released. Many people like me ran away from it scared by the usability problems and unreliability of the extension system. And Gnome kept the same complained-about interface until today, and the project never picked up the pace it had before.

While KDE4 was also seen as a big failure during its release (many bugs!), the biggest issue was simply bugs: not so many people complaining about the direction of the project, although these people probably existed. The project was able to fix the biggest issues and keep moving on (although KDE is still quite famous for being buggier than some of the alternatives), and now they have a community that can probably be described as "healthier than before", and certainly much better when you compare to what's happening to Gnome.

Disclosure: I use Cinnamon.

zxzax
To give another opinion, I also thought GNOME 3 was not good, until around a few years ago. It's a lot better since then, they really ironed out a lot of the issues so you see the contributions start to raise up again recently. The extension API is also getting a lot more stable, but it's not totally there yet.

One area where I think KDE does a lot better is with QML. At the moment GTK doesn't have anything as nice as that to build apps, and that hurts contributions. There's some neat new declarative UI things like vgtk [0] that are looking promising though.

[0] https://github.com/bodil/vgtk