keybinding problems in kde4

KDE used to be quite friendly to key settings, and it was easy to get your editing keys to work everywhere. I used to complain that in GTK (I'm running Gnome mostly) it used to be a problem with global key bindings, but now since kde4 it seems to be the reverse. In Gnome almost anything works fine, I've been using kmail where my keys worked fine, in Opera there is a Unix setting which gives emacs keys, and for firefox I had to use the firemacs plugin.
I was therefore happy when I uppgraded one KDE machine to intrepid and all keybindings worked everywhere (I don't know where it found my editing preferences but it did), even in firefox without adding a plugin, but it is possible that this is only for NON-KDE applications. When I started e.g. kmail composer keys like Ctrl-P,Ctrl-N, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-B (the latter gives Bold... instead of moving my cursor) didn't work, and I wasn't able to assign them either using any type of shortcut editing.

When starting to investigate this it seems as key assignments in KDE is now a real mess. Keys are stolen somewhere (QT or whatever). On my daily production machine which I unfortunately upgraded from hardy heron, where KDE applications did work, to intrepid (I needed to compile stuff dependent on libraries found only in intrepid).

The only KDE application which works on that system now is kedit (3.5.10) (for test only as I use emacs). On the newer applications it seems as not even kill-to-end of line works anymore, I tried to define keys in something called kite and kwrite, but there was no way to say kill-to-end-of-line, but Ctrl-K works fine in the older KDE applications.

From reading comments about the new KDE at different places it seems as KDE4 is a mess and keybindings seems to be a real nightmare mess.

Wouldn't it be wise,
======================= This is my real question ===============================
under the consideration that KDEr4 is not really a mature thing yet (lots and lots of bugs and KDE4 is hard to use, lots of things missing), wouldn't it be wise to have KDE3.5 as an option when installing?
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I'm usually only using the LTS releases for production and in 10.10 then Kubuntu is a no no regarding the current development (you can not easily find things, you can not easily maintain user accounts, you can not even change your own password, this you need to go to the shell to do)

At the moment I'm not at all able to recommend a system with KDE4, it seems as KDE4 is made to make Linux appearance worse than ever. Even I, who is a real Linux and open source promotor in Sweden, have to admit that e.g. XP is much much more user friendly than KDE4.

The strange thing, albeit I rarely use Windows systems, I have to use them somewhat, where I teach for instance, they have Vista systems, the Vista system with the xkeymacs utility is a breeze to use now, consistent key bindings everywhere when using the xkeymacs utility (open source) http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html
I had started to use a few KDE utilities under Gnome, like kmail, but after upgrade to Intrepid they are a pain (apart kedit).