I believe its maintainers truly believe they are taking the right decisions that are good for the project.
They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.
They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.
That's what I think.
I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.
I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.
So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)
KDE is reall pretty good in listening to the users. They announced the removal of workspaces a while ago but then realized some people are actually using it. They reverted their decision on this. Of course people also stepped up to keep maintaining it. That's key in open source projects.
> I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't
This. They have this kind of Apple syndrome of belittling use feedback, minus the part of being a billion dollar megacorporation
Also, things would have gone differently if they forked gnome 2 into a new project and left the original sources intact, instead of dragging all the userbase and distros with them.
To me, this was the shittiest move. Instead of saying "hey, we want to remake gnome into a very opinionated DE so we will make a new project for it", they said "we will use the same gnome2 sources so we will not listen to you but you are forced to listen to us!"
They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.
They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.
That's what I think.
I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.
I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.
So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)