Hi there,
First of all, I'm not a programmer but I have a few ideas for Gnome 2.2 I'd like to throw in the mix. So please don't flame until the end.
First of all, obviously KDE3 is based around QT3 which is based around a commercial application. KDE3 has the ability to 'theme' the commercial QT3-only based apps to look like KDE themes. So if any commercial apps come to Linux/KDE, they can look exactly like KDE. Is it possible for you guys to develop/hack a commercial non-GPL based API that can work with the Gnome libraries. I know this is totally against your philosophies, but it could be good to use in the future to entice commercial developers to come to Linux (Adobe, Macromedia, etc). What are your ideas on this. Maybe the Ximian or RedHat gods (I worship thee) could look at this one. It could be a good way to earn a bit of extra money and manna for you.
Secondly, a good package installer for Gnome. GnoRPM is alright for some users but for newbies it would be good to have an easy to use installer for the nervy first time user. This is also a problem with KDE that they haven't addressed. This could be part of the commercial toolkit that I mentioned before. Something that addresses the dependency issue as well as the usability issue would be a real bonus for users. It would be good to have a Microsoft style (shudder) installer that allows programs to be installed easily and painlessly.
These are only my suggestions after looking at RedHat 8.0. It has promise as a desktop solution, but the commercial apps need to be there. If you choose to ignore this, that's fine. After all, it's only one person's opinion. Cheers and good flaming ;-).
Craig Williamson