> We've made it through decades without breaking theming, what changed?
According to the GNOME team, application developers were getting bug reports filed against their application about broken interface elements, and GNOME was having bug reports filed for the same. The devs stated it was the fault of the theme being used, and as such it would eliminate a lot of headaches for both if themes were forbidden.
"Independent developers" set out to explain this in more detail. [1] While it is targeted at vendors who created their own themes for branding, it echos the overall sentiment toward theming from GNOME itself.
MS-DOS 5.0 was a shrink-wrapped box purchase, so I was sure it was "pure".