The future of Nautilus i GConf

["Tomek Lorek" <tlorek gmail com>]

Hi there!
I've been happily using Gnome since version 1.2 and with impatience been waiting for next versions of this great desktop. Everyting until today looks fine except fact that each next version of 2.x serie  becomes more and more weighty and slower, excluding 
2.16 which was a bit lighter and faster than 2.14. 

I get to know that the main reasons of that is Nautilus and GConf. And here is the questions: has anybody noticed that KDE is much faster than Gnome or is it only me? And if so, does Gnome development team has some plans for Nautilus to become faster and GConf to become replaced with something else? If 
2.18 will additionally come with Mono apps this environment would become just extremely slow :( I really like Gnome, but lately found working with it much less comfortable comparing to KDE, which looks to be the same complex but somehow it manages to work reasonably fast.

Maybe there are some tricks I miss, that would improve the efficiency of Gnome on my desktop?

Best regards,
Tom