Biggest fault of the Gtk/GNOME ecosystem these days is a small bunch of atrociously toxic people centering around RedHat shouting "Nobody besides me works on this, and that! So sit tightly, and shut up with your feedback!," while completely forgetting that it was them who scared off, and trolled out most normal people out of the GNOME community, including some of the best devs they had.
There is a lengthy history of general toxicity, gatekeeping attitudes and the like in the Gnome dev community, dating back to the early 2.x days. This extensive comment https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 dates back to 2003, and back then RedHat wasn't even heavily involved in development (the major corporate sponsors back then were Eazel and Ximian, which are basically unheard of today) but clearly the overall attitude has not changed much since then.
That appears to be a completely out-of-context comment about GNOME made on a KDE blog for unclear reasons. But anyway, I looked through most of the links in that comment and I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. There are some heated arguments around technical issues in those mailing list posts, but there are also many positive comments such as this:
>If anything, we have to turn the GNOME community around and make this community a tolerant community, and a community of love. I have to say that I am surprised by how well the gnome-love mailing list has taken of, and surprised to see various newcomers to the platform actually writing code and becoming productive.
Also, that was quite a long time ago (some posts are from earlier than 2003) and most of those people involved in those threads don't appear to be associated with the project anymore. It certainly seems like they were able to work out some of their process issues in the last 17 years seeing as how the bonobo/orbit parts were dropped entirely.
That's a very, very old "manifesto" that was pasted verbatim into almost every FLOSS news site and mailing list at the time (relevant or not), written by a well known troll and harasser who was removed from multiple FLOSS communities.
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.
