I can’t believe they’re up to 40. I remember installing Fedora Core 1 like it was yesterday. Yum (and now dnf) has come a long way. It used to have to individually retrieve metadata files for every available package, rather than using a single compressed index of all the packages available in the repository you were using. It made just getting to the stage where dependencies were calculated take forever.
I loved the glorious 3.5.x days. What a fantastic DE it was then. I compiled 3.5.0 from source when it was released because it was going to take the Fedora guys too long to package.