The churn is real. For this reason, I’ve thought for a while now that a DE that intentionally locks its overall design and feature set once it hits 1.0, with 95% of engineering effort being put towards optimization and bug fixes afterwards would do well. A DE that doesn’t unexpectedly change even over the course of many years is massively attractive to many.

Probably the closest to this that exists now are XFCE and Cinnamon, but it’s for the wrong reason (those projects’ lack of resources).