No it could not have done it. Gimp was ever only an enthusiast developer-driven, and 1-2 engineers that it actively had working on it could not have pulled it

No it could not have done it. Gimp was ever only an enthusiast developer-driven, and 1-2 engineers that it actively had working on it could not have pulled it off. It has nothing to do with the ideology, just sheer complexity of the effort: GNOME HIG in the 2.0 times was very much focused on good, consistent UI that caters to the users (mostly driven by Sun Microsystems contributions). But bringing individual examples of bad UI (I can do so for MacOS, the poster child of usability too) does not mean it's like that on purpose — it's mostly just that, bad instances. A program is usable based on the whole experience with it, and the results one can achieve. Gimp is not perfect (far from it, really), but for a set of usecases, it is perfectly adequate. The success or lack of it is not only driven by usability: there are perfectly good tools that simply bit the dust for who knows what reason.