>lest people make the mistake of building stuff on top of it.
This is the kind of hyperbole I'm talking about... As with any open source, you don't have to use the parts you don't want. GNOME as a whole is a pretty big project, and like most projects, some of its parts are stable and up-to-date, and some aren't. Lots of other desktops build on pieces of GNOME technologies because they work, and replace the parts they're unhappy with. So I'm sorry if you feel a particular component made a mistake, but it really does not have to be a mistake that affects you, if you handle things the right way.
Can you be more specific about what kind of citation you're looking for?
