Building a solid design culture is extremely hard - in my experience having worked professionally as a designer and engineer, much more so than a solid engineer

Building a solid design culture is extremely hard - in my experience having worked professionally as a designer and engineer, much more so than a solid engineering culture (which is already insanely hard). There’s a reason only a handful of organizations in the world succeed at both. I spent time volunteering for Gnome many years ago (2.x days), and it was extremely hard there, even though it had a reputation for being one of the most designer friendly open source projects. It was a struggle to push for design considerations with obvious benefits such as accessibility - let alone anything remotely resembling aesthetics. The issue with open source is that ultimately, the project maintainers tend to be programmers with programmers’ priorities and views on design. Good design requires consistent, thoughtful sacrifice and compromise, and someone at the top to enforce it. If the open source UI squad makes recommendations that the Gimp maintainers choose to ignore, then what?