To me, it started to go down hill when RedHat hired designers to work on Gnome and they decided Gnome 3 absolutly had to work on tablets. For context, it's the

To me, it started to go down hill when RedHat hired designers to work on Gnome and they decided Gnome 3 absolutly had to work on tablets. For context, it's the time Google also stopped to rely on metrics and gave the key to designers, and tablets were going to kill both the PC and the laptop. Not to say UX designer are not important, but, IMHO, very good one are rare and stubborn one common place. Not that we devs are any better.