Thank you @gordon for an excellent article regarding the history of Gnome & the GTK toolkit - it's very appreciated!
After reading your comprehensive article - one starts to ask some difficult questions: Is Gnome some sort of MS (or M$ - as some members here prefer) trojan horse to sow chaos & unnecessary fragmentation in the Linux world? Because if you look at the decisions made by the Gnome leadership - they are alienating & upsetting their users after every new version. Look at how many new DEs were created or forked from Gnome 2 after Gnome 3 was introduced (Mate being one of them). Does a community oriented project do that? No! Does a corporate oriented project do that? You betcha! Has GNU also become the same sort of trojan horse? Richard Stallman "honourably" resigned as the head of the FSF but didn't think it necessary to resign as the head of GNU. Why not? Richard Stallman gives presentations & lectures at MS' campus - MS certainly pays him well - he definitely doesn't do them for free - so is MS/M$ trying to buy off Stallman to get him to influence the Linux world in their favour? Probably yes. That explains why a "community oriented" project would work so damn hard to destroy their own project & upset their own faithful users. The end result is to kill off the Gnome & GTK projects as you correctly predict. Who benefits from that? Definitely not the open source community.
Thankfully, in the open source community projects can be forked and don't become abandonware - so best of luck with your project & hopefully it becomes the successful drop in replacement to GTK! 