I highly doubt that the DE will be dead so soon. I heard about DE before I heard word one about .NET from MS or this new JAVA gaming B.S. If Amiga promotes it right, and shows that theirs is available now and is complete and working, it won't be going anywhere...they do need better advertising, although it is slowly getting better.
More information is the key here...if somebody goes to any of the sites relating to Amiga right now they can't find didly-squat to look at and oh and ah over. Facts are most times vague and give little or no detail. I think there needs to be tables comparing DE's and OS4's features to similar products, so people can see what they will be getting. There needs to be video of things running, demos and screen shots of all the products (SDK, games, A1, etc...) How else do they expect people to support it if all they have is some new letter once a month?