I don't understand this obsession for Qt4+ and KDE4. KDE4 is every time a step behind GNOME. For this reason I preffer to patch a little the Qt3 to support glib mainloop and then I will develop various applications based on excellent libraries provided by GNOME community. Moreover, glib integration is not broke Qt3 API, so I don't need to patch any of older KDE3 apps.
This is a matter of opinion. ;-) I used to program GTK applications, and in my opinion they are very hard to code and maintain past a certain size and complexity level. Qt3/4/5 applications on the other hand seem more scalable, and those libraries provide many useful features in their respective APIs which were lacking when I last tried the GTK libraries.
Minor hack or no, it is ugly. Replacing strings automatically introduces a risk to make unwanted changes (which sometimes are translated in strange and hard to hunt bugs).
At this point most, of not all, of those bugs have been found and stamped out. There is no real reason not to use TQt3, with its better compatibility and continued development, except for personal preference. :-)
Tim