I DO use K3b and Amarok no matter which desktop. Apparently you
haven't noticed any ill-effects from running KDE programs in a
different than KDE environment either?

I suspect this was a nit-picky deal where the bloat of adding KDE apps
to a Gnome environment is more theoretical than reality. Probably
paying too much attention to the mini-distro creators, DSL, antiX,
Puppy, etc., defending why they left out certain apps. ;-)