Given how at least 5 people who actually were there in leading positions all have refuted your story I do not think you are professional anymore due to the total failure to admit that maybe you are wrong. Nobody except you seems to "remember" this.
Yes, the patent threats were real but nobody has proof that they affected the direction of desktop Linux.
The patent threats I remember from that era was Balmer making a wooly claim that all Linux users were likely infringing. Not just Gnome users and KDE users. And at the same time refusing to elaborate about which specific patents that would be.
And MS making a $440m payment to Novell/SuSE for Linux support to get Novell to make a $40m payment to MS for "patents", which seems a rather lopsided agreement to announce as a combined deal if the patent threats had been anything but MS trying to scare people.
"I tried to be professional and impersonal about this, and such scorn is hurtful."
You've asserted that "everyone seems to forget" why something happened when a whole bunch of people who were there while it happened, and made it happen do not agree with your version of events. People tend to react badly to that sort of thing - especially when things land on HN and threaten to become accepted fact by a lot of folks who weren't there.
Microsoft rattled its patent sabers in the direction of Linux, true enough. But those patent allegations were believed to cover [1] the kernel, OpenOffice.org, the "Linux GUI", and an assortment of "other" things.
I won't claim to have been "there" myself - but I was "there"-adjacent: either working for one of the vendors (Novell), or writing about GNOME, doing an (admittedly small) amount of volunteering for GNOME around marketing/PR, attending GUADECs, and so forth.
My memories are, at this point, admittedly hazy -- but I cannot recall a single conversation or suggestion that the direction of GNOME 3 or Unity were prompted by, inspired by, caused by, or otherwise motivated in any way by Microsoft patents. Not officially in public, not behind closed doors while working at Novell, not in the hallways of SUSE's office in Germany, not during my tenure at Red Hat, not over a beer with any of the GNOME developers, nor any people I talked with between the early whispers of GNOME 3 planning to today.
It seems deeply odd that, had GNOME 3 been a "oh shit, Redmond's gonna sue us" action, nobody in all that time would've let spill. Odder still that those vendors wouldn't have simply pivoted to KDE, CDE, Xfce, or any of the other available environments. Nor did Red Hat jettison FVWM-95 IIRC from any and all repos they'd have been liable for -- given that Red Hat has no love for allowing risky things into RHEL or Fedora, I find it odd that they'd have puttered along with GNOME 2 under threat of patent suits until GNOME 3 was ready.
If you can cite anyone who was involved in GNOME development who says differently, who says "yes, we had to change desktop design due to patents," I'd be curious to hear that story. But when folks like Jeff chime in to say "nope," I'd put the burden on you for proof.
What I recall was that desktop folks were trying to make the desktop enticing enough to move people from Windows. They'd heard time and again how Linux was too difficult to use and went in a direction they thought was more user-friendly.
You also assert that Red Hat wrote GNOME in reaction to Qt not being GPL. Some Red Hatters were involved in the early creation of GNOME but that's not really correct either. Red Hat provided sponsorship early on, but claiming "Red Hat wrote GNOME" is over-simplification to the point of falsification. The real history is much more complicated and more interesting.
> It's difficult to elaborate on "nope", unless someone wanted to do a point-by-point takedown
I would love that, and I think given that I tried hard to give references for my assertions, countering it merits the same.
> which it doesn't deserve.
I am saddened to hear that. I tried to be professional and impersonal about this, and such scorn is hurtful.
> GNOME 3's minimalist top bar
Which is one of my personal primary objections to the environment: this colossal waste of precious vertical pixels, which is squandered to no point.