Comment by p4bl0

> To me, KDE's job should be to organize and render windows, application launcher icons, and the like

I believe you are confusing Plasma, which is KDE's desktop environment, and the KDE Project, which also hosts a lot of applications that can be used with or without Plasma, many of which are multiplatforms. Even on Windows one can use a lot of KDE apps without using their desktop environment, Plasma. It's also totally possible to use Plasma without any of the KDE apps, not even the file manager (Dolphin), the VTE (Konsole), or the simple text editor (Kwrite).

Historically, the desktop environment was KDE (Kool Desktop Environment), but it's been quite a long time since the DE is one among many software that the KDE project works on.

That said, I 100% agree with you on icons, and never used an icon theme :).