Quoting Craig Sanders (cas@taz.net.au):
jwz's point in that CADT post was that the most common reason by far for his gnome-related bug reports being closed (after being mostly ignored for a year or three) was that the software had been rewritten from scratch because rewriting is more fun than bugfixing (and THIS time, it'll be done right)
Moreover, I forgot to mention earlier, JWZ's _real_ objection was to ignoring numerous important bugs for a year or three, followed by making them vanish by closing them with the excuse of them being now irrelevant because of GNOME3. Luis Villa's explanation skirted around the awkward utterly-ignoring-many-bugs-for-multiple-years part. Which was obviously not his fault personally, of course, and his closing the bugs was doubtless logical at the time. JWZ's real objection was how the bugs got that way.