Do you know how MATE and Cinnamon were able to get into Debian's official repositories?
In case you don't let me clarify the MATE situation for you. When MATE initially asked to be accepted into Debian's official repositories it come up against alot of negativity. What was the negativity about? MATE was based on the old Gnome 2.32, it used old Gnome technology, it doubled up on many Gnome things, and it was believed it would take Debian backwards because Debian would have to bring back old technology (GTK2, corba, etc). The MATE devs (and this is one difference between MATE and Trinity because Trinity has 3 people actively working on it MATE has 12) worked to bring MATE up to date with new technology. MATE is also a much smaller DE than Trinity (Trinity has everything excluding the kitchen sink, MATE has the basics of a modern DE). In other words Debian wouldn't have accepted MATE with old technologies in it. Another point is the doubling up, MATE actually doubled up alot of Gnome's behind the screen technology. Trinity has applications that are not just doubling up they even have the same name as KDE programs. MATE totally renamed each and every piece of Gnome 2.32 they forked, Trinity hasn't.
Old technology Qt3 (which is now Tqt) and doubling up of applications. I can't see Debian accepting Trinity (even though it is a great full featured DE) for these 2 reasons. I applaud TIm and crew for their hard work in keeping a great DE alive. I would suggest that people who are vocal (militantly vocal?) about keeping TDE alive start thinking about how others have been able to do this and emulate their work. Don't just go over the same old points actually do some research and offer suggestions.
BTW MATE is hosted by First Colo (which I think is a German company). Methinks Trinity could fix at least one problem by finding a corporate sponsor for hosting. Do you think Blue Systems (I think they are German as well) who sponsor some KDE based projects (Kubuntu being one of them I think) would be interested?