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Selecting paste in a KDE program often pastes completely
different text than if you click the middle mouse button.

I'm *not* talking about what shortcut is assigned to what here. What I *am* talking about is that regardless of how you call copy and paste that average users expect it to do the same thing.

I'm posting this here assuming it's not a bug, in which case I ask:

If people like me who have been using Linux for years haven't figured out the system yet,
might "MMB = paste" be more intuitive for the first-time user?

To see that much "ease of use" in such a daily task as copy and paste in KDE, please vote this idea UP! Thanks!

Actually, I use that 'feature' all the time (as a simple two slot clipboard-like function). I will highlight something and Ctrl+C it and then simply highlight something else (thus have it ready for pasting with middle-click).

In fact, if you are proposing a pervasive copy when highlighting, you could easily loose your Ctrl+C copy just by accidentally double clicking somewhere on a text (and thus highlighting some text).

Your argument about "ease of use" makes an assumption that first time users know what middle-click does, which they don't. Once they do, it becomes an acquired skill and as I demonstrated, this duality can have useful side-effects.

All I know is that virtually everyone I've seen introduced to KDE, sooner or later accidentally clicks the MMB instead of the RMB and goes "Cool! MMB pastes! I wish Windows had that!". Shortly after that they decide that copy and paste is "kind of broken" in Linux / KDE because it often doesn't paste what they "just copied".

I know at least 3 people personally that this happened to. At least 2 of them I had to convince to stop copying things 3 times when they needed it to work (ctrl+c, menu copy and RMB->copy).

MMB for *anything* may not be highly discoverable, but its easier for users to figure out it does something they're familiar with "like copy/paste" than something they've never seen before "automatically copy the last thing you selected regardless of whether you choose copy or not and then use a special type of paste that appears nowhere in any menu and doesn't paste what you chose when you selected copy." One of these two options is more intuitive than the other...

AFAIK this isn't a KDE issue but just how X handles things.

You can change this functionality in the klipper configuration. Just check "synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection". At least in openSUSE this is the default for KDE SC 4.4.