That's a really decent discussion though, from both sides. The option was seriously considered.

It's a world of difference to Gnome devs that will just shut down everything.

PS I do think dolphin is the weakest link in the KDE experience though. But they have made some really good improvements with KDE 6. Like the typable crumb trail.

It's a bit of a contrast though with macOS where the finder is one of the least opinionated parts of the OS (and thus for me one of the best). I think that's more of a historical thing though, Apple's vision seems to be more centered around moving file management into the domain of different apps like on iOS. Another thing i don't like but I think ios has loosened that somewhat as they had to contend that it was necessary to make the iPad more of a productivity device (it still really isn't one though)