KDE 4 is coming to an end and therefore KDE 5 is comming, or rather KDE Framworks 5. Among the many changes is the shift from platform to frameworks. One of the major changes is in the past is kdelibs were one set of libs, now they are being rewroked to be more modular. You can read more about it here. http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/25/frameworks-5
One good thing I can see is that apparently KDE 5 wont be any real change from the end users perspective as opposed to what happened to KDE4 when it first came out.
Really it took them ages to get KDE right with 4, and it seems they are not messing with it to the point of gnome 3’s stripping features nonsense (really saying anything positive about gnome’s developers gives a bad taste in my mouth, sorry I have to be honest.)
Did they then tell you beforehand there would be functionality loss?
I am still missing functionality (show stoppers for me) in KDE PIM. Mainly in Kaddressbook. And that was not advertised. So wait and see what happens with “wont be any real change from the end users perspective”.
Well its bound to happen, hopefully this round it wont be as noticeable.
From what I’ve read on Google+ from Sebastian Kügler and others, the initial steps are a complete port of the current KDE applications. To make this happen with as little effort as possible, the kdelibs indeed had to be reworked. It seems their goal is that the user can move from 4 to 5 without loosing anything. Which IMHO is the best way to go.
They should have done so in the 3.5 to 4 step. And when they do this in the 4 to 5 step before 4 is a repaired to do what 3.5 did, I am afraid it will never be repaired.
The only thing I can say here, that for me it’s not “they/them/” but rather “we”. Like openSUSE, KDE is community driven. Did you try to get in touch with them? I know from experience that the KDE devs do value input from users.
Of course I did. On the KDE forums and on the KDE-PIM mailing list.