That seems like a good niche to exist indeed and many people would probably misunderstand its purpose by it being called a “KDE distribution”. It would perhaps have been better if it were created by some independent group for this purpose and just happened to settle upon KDE as its interface, or rather offer multiple choices to be honest.
No, KDE does not need its own distro, that's the issue. They don't need their own method to distribute it which benefits no one.
The idea of a distribution for this specific purpose is best left in the hands of some organization with experience with this specific purpose, not KDE whose experience is developing desktop environments.
How exactly is it “awkward” for them and how exactly does distributing this in any way improve the development process of KDE? They can't even dogfood it obviously.
Plasma[1] is a desktop environment made by KDE, who also makes lots of other software. They make stuff like Dolphin (file manager), Konsole (terminal emulator), and Partition Manager as OS basics already[2].
Yes, I'm well aware of that, Plasma can be installed on many distributions. How exactly is K.D.E. making their own software distribution benefiting the development of Plasma?
This really feels like they first decided they wanted to make their own distribution for no reason, and then went to search for the niche for it to fill which is the wrong way to do it. Usually someone, who typically does not do anything else at the moment, realizes there is a certain niche that needs to be filled and then decides to make a distribution that fills that niche.
