I'd agree otherwise, but GNOME is a bad example. In the last couple of years they've rewritten a lot of their stack. All APIs are now on GObject Introspection, the GNOME Shell is a completely new thing, written in JavaScript, new set of default applications, etc.

But then again, they seem to still be receiving some amount of corporate sponsorship from Red Hat.

A few years back (when Nokia stopped supporting the project) things looked a lot more gloomy: http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-...

Then again, any desktop environment or toolkit is bound to be somewhat unsexy these days when the focus is on web and mobile.

I also wrote about this back in 2008: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/gnome_in_decay/