Your questions obviously are rhetorical.
And you know what, all your critics are true, I feel exactly the same way. Still ... Qupzilla won't be a replacement. And as long as the latest linux version with the presto engine is supported by Opera I'll continue to use it, and during this time it isn't dead but dying ...
The whole point is: The feature story on DW praising a closed source browser which is about to die is a statement against all existing browsers - explicitly when the author talks about chrome and FF. And what he describes of Qupzilla appears as a future hope of half the worth of existing Opera.
And I *am* as enthusiastic about open source as you are ...