I suspect the KDE3 and Trinity camps could work together --- but the proverbial olive branch is to strip the TQ interface from Trinity.
From a technical perspective this would be a MAJOR, if not FATAL, step backward. Once this is done we would relegate ourselves permanently to the back waters of desktop environments, solely because we will NEVER be able to be fully compatible with (or use internally) Qt4, Qt5, or any future Qt products. Keep in mind that Qt4+ -based programs make up a large chunk of the halfway-decent new applications being generated for Linux, and that lack of proper integration between Qt4/TDE would likely prevent anyone from even trying TDE, let alone using it on a daily basis.
If anything I would propose the opposite, that the KDE:KDE3 developers adopt the minor object renaming that is required to fix the Qt4 compatibility problem and come work with us. While the original tqtinterface was difficult to use and undocumented, the new TQt layer is nearly transparent and the oly visible change is the use of TQ* objects instead of Q* objects. I routinely convert TQt3 code to Qt3 code using nothing but find+replace ("TQ"-->"Q" and "ntq"-->"q"), so the changes are not drastic.
Just my $0.02 from the technical perspective. If it were not for TQt3 providing some assurance of long-term future compatibility with the latest+greates Linux applications, I would have stopped work on TDE long ago.
Tim