I don't think that's meant as a justification for anything, just a statement of fact. Open source projects are heavily dependent on electronic communication (ma

I don't think that's meant as a justification for anything, just a statement of fact. Open source projects are heavily dependent on electronic communication (mailing lists, forums, etc.) for everything from feature planning to user feedback, but what all of those mediums have in common is that people are 100x more likely to post that they hate than that they like something. So, it really is true that no matter what you do or don't do, seemingly everyone on the Internet is going to hate it, when in fact that's just a very vocal minority. Point being, even GNOME 3 (or Unity...) levels of vocal online user hate don't necessarily mean that a meaningful percentage of the user base actually dislikes the changes. Feedback should always be read and reflected on, just not followed slavishly. If you just try to avoid Internet hate from users, you'll never change anything, and even that philosophy will garner you a continuous stream of heated forum posts about how nothing ever changes. It's kind of like reading Yelp reviews. In the aggregate, they help some places stand out from the crowd, but they're still not any sort of objective judgement on the place being reviewed. You always have to think about where the reviewer is coming from and take that into account. For example, dumbasses who go to some incredibly popular and trendy restaraunt at 7:30pm on Friday without reservations, and then post negative reviews because they had to wait too long for a table. Well, duh. In the software world, the equivalent would be complaints about a piece of software not being just like X (where X could be a previous version, or some competitor), when in fact your entire goal is to create something unlike X. If someone wants X and you're making Y, then have to take "Y sucks because it's not X!" complaints with a massive grain of salt. It still doesn't mean you ignore those complaints (maybe Y was a bad idea?), but you wouldn't be doing anyone any favors by doing the most common Open Source thing, which would be to either say, "oh well, I guess we'll stop making Y and just make another X instead", or (even worse, and sadly even more common), "I know, we'll make everyone happy by making something that's both an X and a Y! We can just put a checkbox in the settings!"