>Correction: traditional XML stylesheets were removed with the release of GTK4 so they could introduce a new paradigm, one that was not ready to replace it.

Not really, the XML format is pretty similar. In my experience it works very well, even better than the GTK3 XML, but yes it's lacking a good GUI builder.

>I really don't know what to tell you here, because it's such a vast departure that it's going to make the porting process to GTK4 nearly impossible for most people.

I can't agree, I've talked to some GNOME developers and they don't have much of a problem with it. Glade on GTK3 is not very popular among GNOME developers anyway because it causes some other issues, hopefully those will be fixed with the new GUI builder too.

>said "let's get rid of it, offer a replacement and not develop the replacement". Same thing happened with LibAdwaita, GNOME 40 and pretty much everything else they seek to """improve""".

I'm very confused to what you're saying, there are replacements for all that being developed, but it takes time to do it.

>Who's fault is that? Is it the aggressive, unfriendly leadership? Or maybe it's the GNOME superstar celebrities, who make completely bonkers changes and expect the rest of the community to follow their lead without question?

I'm also very confused what you're talking about, I've talked to the Juan (the person working on the new GUI builder) and he's a pretty nice guy working as hard as he can. I've never seen him harass or ostracize anyone or refuse questions. You're generalizing and I wish you wouldn't do that, it's rude to the people who work hard on this and offer no ill will. I've never seen any aggressive leadership or superstar celebrities there either, this is mostly self-directed volunteers working in their area of interest.

>If their ship is sinking, I'm perfectly contented to stay onboard GTK3 and watch as they sink beneath the surface. Several people said this was a bad idea, but it was their hubris that ultimately ruined GTK4.

Well you lose some other improvements in GTK4 if you do this. Those improvements are very unlikely to be brought to GTK3 because they needed an API change. That's why it's a bad idea. Of course you can continue to use GTK3 if you want but you'll continue to miss out on those improvements. It's up to you to say how long you'll be OK with that, but you should know upstream has said that GTK3 will not gain any new features anymore.

>If they need "extra contributors" to fix that, then they should have thought about that before telling everyone else to screw off.

I don't know who was told to screw off, there are open calls for contributors in all these areas.

>I was in freenode.

Well Freenode is not the GNOME IRC so I have no idea what this has to do with GNOME or GTK. Yes there are trolls and unhelpful people in random freenode channels, I never used freenode much myself for that reason. GNOME has its own IRC server, and actually I think they switched to Matrix recently.

>The issue is that they don't even support that. Flatpak has over 600 open issues of it's own, and implementing it can oftentimes lead to more work, nonfunctional features (like distro-native features in Bottles, for example) and infinite bikeshedding.

I know about some of these issues and I'm personally affected by them but what you're missing is that there is actually no other option. Getting rid of Flatpak would leave them with no real way to deploy these apps at all. It's a choice between something buggy that's being worked on (slowly) and leaving app developers out in the cold with nothing. Distro package managers don't solve the problem, they created the whole problem that Flatpak exists to solve.