I wish they could just spin off a QT3-era widget library for cross platform desktop only stuff. All the new QtQuick declarative and mobile stuff just confuses me and gets in the way. Believe it or not, Qt used to be a small and lightweight library.
I do not see this as being very practical. I think that many of the people who use Qt today have been using Qt 4.x or Qt 5.x, whereas the people who would use something like Qt 3.x are probably already using something more along the lines of WxWidgets. Changes that made Qt 4 and up different from Qt 3 were made for a reason.
That being said, if a Qt 3-type spin-off were desired and had enough support, I do not see the current developers of Qt (both Digia and outside of Digia) as spending a lot of time on it, since most of the focus is specifically on the features you would want to avoid.
My suggestion would be that if you want a widgets-only version of Qt, you could gather a group to create an LGPL spin-off of Qt 4 or Qt 5 using the specific modules you want as a starting base. (I may be wrong, but I think Qt3 still has messy licensing from the Trolltech days).
And the best part is that in Qt 5.x the individual components are separate source packages. Off the top of my head ... base for the core Qt; widgets for old style widget library; script and declarative for QtQuick; system for I-don't-remember-what; and so on.
If you don't need QtQuick or QtWebKit, you can actually drop quite a few of the packages.
