When the KDE 4 rewrite first released version 4.0, it was not very polished and even had a bunch of features missing. 4.1 was better, but still not enough to satisfy reviewers (although actual users liked it somewhat better). By release 4.4, it was back to being polished and pretty complete, but everyone had stopped paying attention after a few "bad" (according to reviewers, if not actual users) versions.