The problem has mostly to do with the fact that Gnome has created a huge base of shared object dependencies and many library developers change APIs or their functions in incompatibile ways.

Ah ok. So if a moron developer decides to change an API and not make it backwards compatible and not deprecate it and not warn anybody, that's going to break apps that use those API's in strange, unpredictable ways. That's just the price of dynamic linking. I think the benefits of dynamic linking far outweigh the times this happens, don't they?

As for developing for Linux and not for UNIX... I'm assuming this means that developers are taking shortcuts when they write apps such that they run on Linux, but don't run on other flavors of UNIX. Isn't that just a fact of life when your average open source developer has a Linux box at home rather than a Solaris or AIX box?