Ronald, as you say, KDE seems to be miles ahead. It is somewhat true if you think about the architecture. They have a mature toolkit, Qt, that is licensed under a Free Software license[1], and that runs on 3 major platforms, 1 free (X11), 2 non-free, allowing to capitalize on a truely Free Software experience will providing freedom of choice: develop for a Free Software operating system (Linux, BSD, or whatever else) and seemlessly port to non-free operating systems: MS-Windows and MacOS X. The other things KDE have are technologies like DCOP, KPart, a web browser component (KHTML) and even imaging (look at KImageEffect). And even if some of this have similar counterpart in Gnome, the developers find them easier in KDE[2]. But I have always had issues with KDE UI which unlike Gnome is much less polished and much more "provide everything you can"[3].

But let's go back to DCOP. DCOP has been around for over 6 years and provided a simple to use structured IPC mechanism for KDE, on top of X11. I would have had implemented a scripting architecture for KDE, I would have used DCOP as the IPC subsystem. But DCOP is now deprecated for KDE4 in favor of D-BUS. See thiago's post. Guys, you did the right thing. We need to share this infrastructure middleware amongst the free desktops. Why? Because it leverage the ability to provide other high level layer to integrate between Gnome and KDE. I'm thinking about my ideas on scripting. Maybe Gnome should just do like KDE: ditch Corba.

Notes

[1] yes, re-read the licence, it is all about protecting that Free Software nature while trying to streamline revenue for continued development and maintenance

[2] unless you hate C++ which seems to often be the justification for Gnome

[3] The list is actually very long