The distros did a shitty job there; they should have seen that 4.0 wasn't ready (esp. when the KDE devs were even saying so), and continued to fully support KDE

The distros did a shitty job there; they should have seen that 4.0 wasn't ready (esp. when the KDE devs were even saying so), and continued to fully support KDE 3.x until 4.x was really ready for prime-time. Instead, the stupid distro maintainers completely dropped support for 3.x, forcing people to either use KDE4.x or to stick with an older distro version. The whole point of a distro is to make intelligent choices about the software to include in the distribution and package it up into a coherent system for users to use. Even moreso for distros that claim to focus on stability, where sticking with older versions of packages is the norm.