I think they have every freedom to do what they want. It will just turn out badly if they use that freedom to choose a walled-garden approach that expresses amb

I think they have every freedom to do what they want. It will just turn out badly if they use that freedom to choose a walled-garden approach that expresses ambivalence to both user support and on-boarding new contributors by giving them tasks with visible impact and reasonable amounts of creative autonomy. I only care about what core devs “should” do from the perspective of “what keeps a project healthy.” If someone wants to optimize that choice for something else, like their personal enjoyment of hacking on a new feature, I think it would have unfortunate consequences, but other than stating my feeling about that, I couldn’t care less and it seems irrelevant to the discussion. That’s why I characterize it as an ego problem. As far as the whole rest of the project and user base is concerned, what some particular person wants just doesn’t matter. Yes, they’re free to make their choices that way. Then it just takes that particular case out of the discussion we’re having here about providing user support.