It all comes down to impact. Removing an unused and long-deprecated interface is low impact. Removing a widely-used interface is very high impact. When you h

It all comes down to impact. Removing an unused and long-deprecated interface is low impact. Removing a widely-used interface is very high impact. When you have an interface that is nearly 25 years old and a staple part of every GTK+ application in existence... that's a very high impact change. I'm unsure how the GTK+ developers rationalised that one. But I am completely certain they made the wrong call there. It's too disruptive. I don't think it should have ever been dropped, or considered for dropping. Deprecated, yes. But not dropped. I'm coming from the perspective of an end-user of GTK+: an application developer. Though I have historically also contributed bits upstream. I moved away from using GTK+ several years back at this point, precisely because the upstream maintenance practices were too much of an ongoing imposition, along with all the other criticisms one can make of it. GTK+ might be "free", but the cost of using it is very, very high.