I doubted we would ever got close to that. And KDE demonstrated the contrary, that it was possible to get it done, and that I could be done by a small team of programmers. Therefore, Gnome mixes those elements, that is, producing a friendly and convinient environment. All the applications use the same toolkit, all use the same libraries, all should look and feel the same, all should be easy to use and all should look attractive. Say, for example what we are discussing right now is this, your phone list and email list need a little database.
Programs grow like beasts.
So the idea is to do everything with small components. You will have a mailer program that will send requests to a addresses mantainer program. It is not a simple command line program, is a full graphical interface. So the idea here is that you can even replace the components. You can interchange editors as long as you implement the interface.