...and REengineering applications and distribution components that already worked in fulfilling its respective role/function reasonably well, the overall quality and stability of the "desktop user experience" would improve drastically, and there would be significantly less release delays.

Although, the fedora devs have been hammering away pretty heavily at ARM platforms, and (as others have pointed out) it is free, so some slack should clearly be given.

Progress and change are important, and overall quite good, but whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

Fellow TR member and aficionado Apotheon (http://www.techrepublic.com/members/profile/3923716) succinctly described this state of affairs in an article discussion a while back (http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-388834-3645774):

"There is a deep sickness in the Linux community that leads to desperately awful inconsistencies even within a single distribution's configuration, rapid and wholly unnecessary turnover in system components, contradictory paths forward in UI design, tremendous unnecessary complexity, and so on."

I also support the idea of rolling releases, which would be inherently more conducive to steady, incremental improvements, as opposed to the endless cycle of "innovative" rewrites and breakages that just pisses off end users, until they get used to the new state of the software (at which point, it seems to inevitably get rewritten again). GNOME shell or Unity anyone?