I'm just applying the patch over at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90775 - is there anything else that we can do to help move this along? It sounds like the concern expressed there focused on ~/.kde (which is not removed).
This commit drops the obsolete support for the GNOME-specific directory for .desktop files, since it has not been needed since GNOME 2.10, and since it forces the creation of ~/.gnome whether you want it or not.