Bah
Aaron Seigo is raving about a recent change in Kopete that was also backported. Instead of ctrl-enter, now plain enter sends a message. I noticed... One morning, after the usual apt-get update I noticed that suddenly I couldn't send messages anymore. Damn. It took a while and some googling to realize that I hadn't stumbled into a bug, and some more googling to find out how to fix it(1). An hour later I had found the configuration option to get the old defaults back.
The defaults that were consistent with KMail and Kopete. That my fingers were used to. That were sensible because, well, pressing enter gives a newline in every other multi-line text box. And ctrl-enter is 'send message' pretty well anywhere else in KDE. So this change is nothing to rave about. It has made KDE less consistent. And inconsistency is bad. There is only one rule about making usable applications, and that is to keep your applications as consistent as possible with their environment. (I wish, Ceterum-censeo-Carthaginem-esse-delendam-style, that KMail and KNode could agree on making 'b' the previous message key. Consistency.)
There is no earthly reason to make applications mimic other applications of the same class in other environments, because people seldom use those applications side-to-side. If you want to offer an easy transition to people used to gaim, offer a gaim compatibility mode when the application is first started. (Word did this for WordPerfect users) Never, ever, ever change keyboard shortcuts in an application installation that a user has already been using.