I do not see this as being very practical. I think that many of the people who use Qt today have been using Qt 4.x or Qt 5.x, whereas the people who would use s

I do not see this as being very practical. I think that many of the people who use Qt today have been using Qt 4.x or Qt 5.x, whereas the people who would use something like Qt 3.x are probably already using something more along the lines of WxWidgets. Changes that made Qt 4 and up different from Qt 3 were made for a reason. That being said, if a Qt 3-type spin-off were desired and had enough support, I do not see the current developers of Qt (both Digia and outside of Digia) as spending a lot of time on it, since most of the focus is specifically on the features you would want to avoid. My suggestion would be that if you want a widgets-only version of Qt, you could gather a group to create an LGPL spin-off of Qt 4 or Qt 5 using the specific modules you want as a starting base. (I may be wrong, but I think Qt3 still has messy licensing from the Trolltech days).