The DBSD project is dying, but not dead yet... it will never be. As long as it's OSS, there still is possibility that DBSD be kept developed, either in official/unofficial or even private manners.
As for kde3 being used rather than kde4 for now, I think it's a correct policy. People usually prefer DesktopBSD to PCBSD largely because it's faster and lighter than the latter. I recently tried PCBSD7.1 as well as FBSD7.2+kde4.2.2 on my laptop and realised how sluggish an old system can be with kde4. I think kde4 is actually not as terrible as what people have been criticising, but I do feel it only suits modern or recent machines. On the other hand, I'm quite happy to stay with DBSD with kde3 for now, until I develop my own edition of DBSD in the near future.