I've learned an important lesson:

code quality matters less than marketing. You need to develop a fan base. Implementation matters far less than any of this.

Lots of flashy features - this is what's so good about visualizations

Lots of useless features that are "cool", and that are enabled by default

More than anything, you have to self promote. Everywhere, all the time, constantly. People need to know that your software is the best, even if it's not. Even if you lie.

People want lots of knobs and twiddles and programs that take up the entire screen and then some.

2000-2007

plugins all the way down the equalizer that let you specify the number of bands things are tiny, simple, or they're complex video worked all along

the UI was misleading - there was a lot more interesting stuff buried in there

Now to figure out what to use in KDE4...