The earlier versions weren't as polished as what we have right now and it felt like we were missing features that were working fine on the latest gnome 2 release but this is all in the past. It happened in 2011.

Ironically the same happened in the kde world a few years before. I had been a very happy user of kde 3.x and kde 4.x happened to be a crashy pos and it only really got better with kde5.