I don't mind these GNOME forks so much.  But I would hope that they would take as mall portion of the developers and invest it in GNOME so since they have some dependencies on the internal components like GTK+.

Also, once you reach feature parity with GNOME 2, where will they go from there?  Will they just keep it in steady state or will they be essentially done?

Finally, what would be the attraction to new users, younger users who have grown up on touch interfaces like tablets and cell phones and are essentially presented with a soup'd up windows 95 look alike?  What about when laptops especially windows 8 enabled laptops have touch screens?  Will this design help them?  How can this interface work with these new hardware capabilities?

We aren't fucking around with design and changing interface just because.  Hardware is changing, new capabilities are required and sometimes a certain design has reached it's shelf life.