Sorry for going on about this topic, but… eXpert Zone had an
article which on the whole I found to be well thought out. There
was an Achille’s heel in their argument, though:
As I already said, the turning point, and most fundamental line, in
the discussion was “A feature will be implemented if and only if there
is a developer who wants to implement it, regardless of the number of
votes it’s received.”. This later on in the discussion came down
to “if the developer has a need for it himself”. [emphasis added]
How exactly was that conclusion drawn? While there were some
developers who expressed this personal choice (which is perfectly fine
for volunteers to do), others expressed willingness to implement
features even that they might not use themselves and others pointed
out that those employed to work on Gnome were responding to customer
requests. The statement they quoted was correct that features are
only implemented if developers want to do so, but unfortunately they
made an inaccurate inference.