Just upgraded to 4.3 and tried out some of the stuff I considered unusable in 4.2.4, and I'm amazed. The fancy list layout config widget from Amarok 2 is now everywhere, and it WORKS. KMail has made a HUGE leap forward in terms of configurability (thread view...) and, erm... working-ness. I've always wanted to dump Thunderbird because KMail conceptually rocks it to pieces, but sadly, in practice it just hadn't been up to the job so far... but it finally seems to have matured. And oh by the gods, the network kioslave is back. And now it even speaks Zeroconf! YES baby!

When I tried 4.1, I almost lost my confidence that this was the way to go for any serious power-user (almost switched to gnome, but that kinda made me feel like I lost 8 or 9 fingers)

All in all I must say, you guys have not only restored my confidence that KDE is THE most innovative and powerful desktop env, no, you increasingly rock my guts by proving that there are yet some things which actually IMPROVE over time. Thank you guys SO much for creating my next-generation, kickass, show-off, make-vista-users-look-like-idiots-stuck-in-mid-90s user interface.

Ah, by the way, I'd really appreciate some easier to find (centralized) API docs^^

Not just Vista -- KDE already has features that Windows 7 lacks. This means that, given another version of Windows won't likely come out for at least another 3 years, KDE will remain a more advanced desktop environment for quite some time.

If you are after centeralised API documentation for KDE, then you can go to http://api.kde.org.
Qt documentation is available from http://doc.trolltech.com

Good! This seems to be a general opinion. KDE's not hearing from the critics that wanted to fork the code.

Maybe they took a look at the KDE 3.5 code and stared at it like o.o'

"Yes, that's EXACTLY why we did what we did with 4.0."