Hey -- purgatory is less severe than hell. It's not insurmountable, but it's there, nonetheless. 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.

This crops up a lot more under non-Linux Unices than under Linux itself, because, as I feared years ago, people are now developing for Linux and not for Unix. And it seems the quality of the average Unix open source software developer has gone way downhill in the last 10 years.