Switching desktop environments

So, like many people, I have received GNOME 3 in the latest upgrade on Debian testing, and switched away to Xfce very soon after. What's amazing (to me) about this whole experience, however, is how easy it is to switch desktop environments in Debian. Two years ago, I fled KDE in very similar circumstances. I have since used Openbox, LXDE, GNOME, Xfce, as well as a few more obscure window managers in short-lived experiments. All of this was easy to do and worked flawlessly. Most of my settings, my preferred programs, and startup applications were preserved, and if I didn't like it, I could switch back without a problem. (Ironically, the upgrades from KDE 3 to KDE 4 and from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 lost far more settings than changes to other environments.) And of course you can mix and match applications from different environments, and these days this doesn't result in a visual crime. I don't know whom to thank for this, probably a combination of upstream developers, freedesktop.org guys, and Debian maintainers. Keep it up.