The biggest deal was that you couldn't have old and new and many distros with a rapid release cycle adopted new versions as soon as they became available. For

The biggest deal was that you couldn't have old and new and many distros with a rapid release cycle adopted new versions as soon as they became available. For instance KDE 4.0 which wasn't really ready came out 11 January 2008. Fedora 9 came out in May. Had simply choosing 3 or 4 beta as it might accurately have been called been possible at login I think there would have been zero issues. 4.0 wasn't actively broken but it lacked polish and it was missing features from 3.x that hasn't been implemented yet.