Free software scares normal people

OP should check out Gnome Circle:

https://circle.gnome.org

The problem with why so many OSS/free software apps look bad can be demonstrated by the (still ongoing) backlash to Gnome 3+. It just gets exhausting defending every decision to death.

Sometimes projects need the spine to say "no, we're not doing that."

GNOME 3+ developers put themselves in the inevitable (and unenviable) position of defending every decision to death because they limited the user's ability to make many, many decisions that were possible in previous versions.

There's nothing wrong with an opinionated desktop environment or even an opinionated Linux distribution. But, prior to GNOME 3, the project was highly configurable. Now it is not.

When people start up new highly opinionated projects (e.g. crunchbang, Omarchy), the feedback is generally more positive because those who try it and stick with it are the ones who like the project's opinions. The people who don't like those opinions just stop using it. There isn't a large, established base of longstanding users who are invested in workflows, features, and options.

Ideally you'd want to add selectable options for users in a way that's sustainable long-term and not just panic-adding things all over the place because of user demands. That's how you get the Handbrake situation that OP article is complaining about.

Gnome 3 was a big update and adding options, which does happen, is not free. There were changes from Gnome 2 and 3 and adding some options "back" from Gnome 2 is really asking for that feature to be rewritten from scratch (not all the time, but a lot of the time).

That the Gnome team has different priorities from other DEs, one of them being "keep the design consistent and sustainable," is completely valid and preferred by many users like myself.

Gnome developers also have a habit of telling users (and other developers who try to integrate with their DE) who ask for those missing features that they're "holding it wrong" etc. Quite often this is justified along the lines of, "we did a UX study and you don't really need to do X so we made it do Y instead!"

After dealing with this kind of stuff for 14 years, it shouldn't be surprising that you don't have a lot of folk left who are willing to extend good faith to Gnome devs.