Fantastic. They seem to be handling this better than the debacle that was the 4.0 release. Kudos to the team for all their hard work.
On the other hand, GNOME 3 was a debacle, without any doubt. KDE 4 resulted in nowhere near the level of backlash and response that GNOME 3 did. I mean, GNOME 3 was and is so bad that it spawned two rather significant and ongoing salvage attempts in MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to completely driving away a lot of existing users. We just didn't see anything close to that with KDE 4.
The early adopters of both complained about how different everything was, but at least in KDE land version 3 was still available for a while. It took the Mate project to maintain Gnome 2.
Trinity is a fork of KDE3, that was highly-publicized at the time and still sees some ongoing development.