In Shock Development, Free Software Developers Write The Software They Want To Write!

Film at 11.

"Going their own way" = "writing the code they want to write, which they can, because they're writing it; you're just moving your noisehole"

Linus Torvalds: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

Jesus H. Christ, people are whiny fucks.

The people who write GTK+ do know better than you; that's why they're writing it and you're not. Of course, all you need to do to change that is get off your arse and do something. File bugs. Write documentation. Nag the developers until they implement your feature just to make you go away.

Why is the GTK+ development unfortunate? Should software reach a basic point of functionality and stay there?

There's nothing whatsoever stopping you picking a version of GTK+ (or, indeed, GNOME) that pleases you and sticking with it. Now, it might be more work to get hold of, and your current distro might not explicitly support it, so go make your own packages, or go run Slackware or LFS or whatever.