Last time I used KDE, it couldn't find `ksplashqml`, and had to reinstall the OS (didn't know what TTY was at the time). It also frequently crashed three times, and counting. GNOME is minimal and out of my way. The only space GNOME Shell takes up is the top bar. Nothing more, nothing less. Not to mention the off-brand Hot Corner.
I believe you had a bad experience, but i would suggest the blame lays on your package maintainer - in debian (and ubuntu), ksplashqml should be part of the plasma-workspace package, which you can't avoid. What distro were you using?
Feel free to stop replying at any point since I can't really help, but I can't see a reason why /usr/bin/ksplashqml itself would have gone missing.
Is it possible that ksplashqml was really present, and actually the "not found" error was because ksplashqml could not find a custom splash theme file? Had you installed and removed any custom themes?
No wonder you had a poor experience. Distros that don't treat KDE as a first-class DE are well-known to have a generally poor KDE experience. Kubuntu is probably the worst KDE-focused distro, and you didn't even start with Kubuntu as a base.
A slightly poorer experience for a distro's non-flagship DE is one thing, a major binary being outright missing is another. This should have still worked - Ubuntu does support adding KDE by installing that package, kubuntu-desktop depends on plasma-workspace which contains /usr/bin/ksplashqml.
