I'm not a GTK user, so maybe I'm missing something here. And I certainly agree with the version number complaints. But these quotes trouble me: "what GTK really needs to do is sit down and flesh out a decent API" and "And if you’re having to mess with your API on a continual basis, you’re doing it wrong. Like, the whole software development thing, all wrong."

I think there's an conceptual error here. There are a lot of bad reasons to change software, but I think there are two really good reasons: 1) circumstances change, and 2) we have learned something. Or conversely, I think the only time software can have a static design is when circumstances are static and you never learn anything.

There's this common notion that if people just sit down and think really hard, they will design the perfect thing. That's a mirage. The iPod went through more than a hundred physical revisions before launch. And it has changed a great deal in the 15 years since. Is that because Apple didn't just sit down and think enough? Nope. Even the humble paperclip evolved over decades. If perfect software ever happens, that belongs to a future age.