linuxviolin wrote:And use the fallback mode which sucks too and which may not be there in the future GNOME releases...
once i asked you for the citation

well, today i went looking for it
gnome panel3 by Vincent Vuntz
and it starts like this
Sure, the fallback mode is not our target in terms of design, but that doesn't mean it's unloved
and
The fallback mode is made of the same components as your GNOME 2 session. Except that they got boosted with love! Let me tell you about the changes in gnome-panel for GNOME 3.0 to give you an idea of what kind of love I'm talking about.
then a boring list of technicalities to show how gnome-panel3 is superior and more stable than gnome-panel2.x, resumed in this
That's a lot of changes, and if you have any doubts about that, here are some stats: 174 files changed, 12699 insertions(+), 19364 deletions(-) (this is just for code, and it doesn't include translations, schemas, etc.). It's actually the second most active development cycle in terms of lines changed since 2.0 (the first one being the one from 2.2 to 2.4, which included a nearly complete rewrite of a good part of the code).
then to answer your question directly, in the comments
@T_U: I don't think there's any plan to make gnome-panel go away since we'll keep the fallback mode for quite some time, I guess. It might be less actively developed, but it won't just disappear in, say, 3.2 or 3.4.
@Longtime Gnome: the fallback mode was never an afterthought; since the beginning of the GNOME 3 planning, we mentioned gnome-panel would stay maintained for a long while...
@eRadical: the fallback mode is going to be maintained for the GNOME 3 lifecycle. That's the plan. This has been mentioned multiple times already...
so, it looks like it's staying at least for a while (one year?)