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Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again. You can still have a radical change without having to throw away all of the code that's already been written. Also, they are porting the whole of the KDE project from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4, since Qt4 is not backward-compatible with Qt3, so in a sense, they are changing the toolkit - but they are porting to one that is very, very similar to the one they use now. ;) What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it, anything else is really just a matter of preference.

The write-up also seemed rather sparse in details, so while I am writing this post I may as well chuck in a few links:

Interesting interview with Aaron Seigo
Another good interview with Zack Rusin
Official site for KDE Plasma, the KDE4 desktop.

"Oh, uhm... would not time be better spent at kde.org fixing the many bugs in KDE 3?"

What makes you think they won't? Migrating to a new version of the Qt framework doesn't require rewriting all of the underlying logic, therefore allowing for bug fixes in a major portion of application code. Not to mention, there are plans for another release in the 3.x series (development can happen in parallel). Also, you should be happy to know that the things you complain about, kicker and kdesktop, are slated to undergo a major overhaul for the KDE4 release.

KDE is going to give its well-known 'K' up. See the new plasma library (http://plasma.bddf.ca/) or the coming tenor search framework... I sounds more serious maybe.

The K is actually a recognition mark, but *for me* it doesn't sound well for all the names... (Kubuntu, for instance).