I was there when GNOME started. Was working heavily with GTK+ and GIMP at the time. Most of GNOME was tossed together haphazardly in a mad dash to catch up with KDE. There were astroturfing campaigns against KDE/Qt, organized on the GIMP IRC servers. The hate on Slashdot towards KDE was crazy, and much of it coming directly from GNOME camp. GNOME 1.x was a total shitshow. The code was horrid, and nothing was stable at all. Luckily their poor standards of code quality never hurt GTK+ much, as the GIMP guys still knew what the hell they were doing.
KDE was indeed much better. GNOME 1.x was awful. I and others like me still used GNOME 1.x, because I wanted a free desktop environment.
You weren't the only one on #gimp; don't pretend GIMP had a much better class of developers. Remember GEGL used to refer to hairy parts of the codebase (Genetically-Engineered Goat, Large) that people were afraid of touching.
Miguel left GNOME before 2.0 shipped, and started working on Mono full-time. If you've ever used GNOME 1.0, it was barely more than a set of ORB-based applications you stacked on top of Enlightenment DR 0.15 (or Sawmill/Sawfish if you weren't cool/used RedHat after Raster left). The panel was awful, the fonts were awful. Themeing (once they moved to gdkpixbuf rather than imlib) was awful. It didn't even have Human Interface Guidelines until Eugenia Loli-Queru basically forced her opinion on the devs.
Sun Microsystems had to dedicate months of programming and useability testing to get the UI to a point that everyone didn't hate it anymore.
Once Miguel gave up the reins, others took GNOME where it is today. This is similar to Lennart Poettering, wherein NetworkManager and PulseAudio became much better/more stable/useable when he left.
A name i have not thought about in a long long time, and why i stopped reading OSNews...
looking back, it was the first time I _really_ understood that sitting down and learning to manage the relevant config files manually was going to be easier than dealing with a GUI app. hell, I learned for both redhat _and_ debian based distros.
I don't know if I would have gone down the path I have if it wasn't for that. that's insane...
Frankly the guy seems very similar to Poettering. Stuff he creates, for the most part, only really becomes usable once the leaves the project.