There's some justification in deferring to user interface designers with respect to the vision for the interface. An authoritarian system can work, though you

There's some justification in deferring to user interface designers with respect to the vision for the interface. An authoritarian system can work, though you should be sensitive to how you present that authority. "wontfix" is socially dangerous to use. But authority only works if you use that authority to do the right thing. Unity isn't doing that. I am in part frustrated that Unity got _worse_ with the latest Ubuntu release, and I'm frustrated that it has lots of bugs, and the interface is neither traditional nor discoverable. But even worse than these problems is the problem that Unity isn't pursuing a worthy goal. It's a rethinking of how you manage applications and files on the Linux desktop, but the Linux desktop has never been particularly functional or filled out and it falls behind further with time. The major trends we see is the desktop spiraling in on a single application, the browser, and files and media moving to the cloud. Unity is messing around with something that will never win the hearts and minds of new users, while it alienates what users there already are. I've never met someone who loves Unity! There's a couple people who accept it, and a much larger group that hates it. (Personally once I figured out to install gnome-shell I can like Ubuntu again, but Unity really did almost push me over the edge to get a Mac.) It's not to say that a rethinking of the Linux UI is an entirely useless endevour, but Ubuntu and Canonical should not be pursuing a fantasy of a rich ecosystem of GUI apps. There are maybe a dozen relevant applications on Linux now, and that number will only get smaller. But the beauty of this is that if you just pursue an experience that encompasses those dozen applications, and you dive deep into those applications (which you can because they are all open source!) then something really neat could come out of that. I think people could get behind an idea like that, even if those same people simultaneously felt annoyed with particular changes that came from that. But it's hard to look past those problems when it feels like present usability is being compromised for a misguided fantasy.