TFA lists improvements to graphics tablet support, HiDPI support, and — in the title itself — switching to a more maintained UI toolkit.

1) That is precisely my point. End-users often think that new stuff can be easily added on top of older stuff, and if developers don't do that, they are just stupid, shortsighted, or whatever. For 2.10, we had to finish the GEGL port to give people much anticipated things like high bit depth precision editing (up to 32f per channel). For 3.0, we now have to port GIMP to an actually maintained version of GTK because some things are just broken for good in GTK2, this is mostly done and will be polished in the 2.99.x series. Once it's done, we will have the solid foundations to expose non-destructive editing (unless someone really clever arrives to hack it into v3.0 but I wouldn't hold my breath for that).

2) I'm the guy who wrote a chunk of that release notes (and most of the release notes in the past 10+ years). You don't need to babytalk to me about any of that stuff :)

The GP didn't babytalk you. They just pointed out a seeming contradiction.

Lashing out at bystanders & spamming passive-aggressive smilies does not cultivate trust in GIMP's leadership.

I couldn't care less about people who see one smiley face and go completely berserk. I never met you. I don't know anything about you. I will forget you in a few minutes.

I certainly hope you'll forget about me. It's unhealthy to nurse grudges against random, online commenters.

Otherwise, all that building resentment will feed back into your insecurities, which will distort your sensitivity to criticism and magnify your next explosion.

That is prokoudine's point: you need to get the fundamental switch to GTK3 done first and only then start to implement non-destructive editing.

GTK wouldn’t exist without GIMP, so I’m willing to forgive them for that :)