So, I've switched from Debian unstable to RedHat 8.0. I am pretty happy with it. I think the availability of apt for RH is what eventually pushed me over the edge.
GNOME
Mark reviewed my recent-files code, and gave me some good comments/criticism. He even did some cleanup/optimization work for me. So now, hopefully, he will accept my panel patch adding the recent docs menu. I'm starting to get a little nervous now about the recent-files stuff actually making it in to 2.2. It still hasn't been moved to a stable library yet, and also the feature freeze for 2.2 is coming up rapidly. AFAIK, only 2 apps are using this code, and that's only because I patched them myself. If it doesn't make it, it's only my fault, but I've been working on this for like 6 months so it's kind of pathetic. :/
I implemented a sidebar for nautilus that displays the available emblems, and lets you drag them to files/folders. You can also drag random images from the file manager to the sidebar to add those images as an emblem. Alex helped out a lot with this....he is so cool. Today, I made it work with web browsers (so you can dnd an image or a link to one to add it as an emblem). This limited amount of nautilus hacking was really fun. I want to do more, something less trivial, but haven't really thought of much yet.