Quoting Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>:
That is condescending and dismissive.
...
Please do try to read through the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines even reading a little of it might help give a sense of some of the underlying concepts.
You may want to carefully examine your own tone.
If the Inkscape developers cannot step back and see most of the problems themselves things will only get worse again.
I'll give you a pass, as it's easy to lose track of the discussions now that the mailing list is so high-volume, but most of the concerns you've mentioned have been raised by other Inkscape developers on this exact list, often multiple times.
A few things we do strongly disagree with, sometimes because the requests are impractical or contradictory due to technical issues and annoying properties of the SVG specification (c.f. our discussion re: your request for ellipse-as-<ellipse> a month or two back, versus your current demand for the removal of distinctions between shapes and paths).
In many cases, though, things are as they are due to lack of time and/or difficulty in finding workable alternatives. The current developers are pretty much maxed out, and a most of our time goes into bugfixing and resolving architectural issues.
Stuff like the preferences dialog has annoyed me for a long time (and I'm on record many places, e.g. here on the list and on Slashdot as saying so), but I simply cannot do anything about it without abandoning other work.
It often is an either/or choice between bug fixing and UI work for us. e.g. I too am unhappy with the current prominence of the About Memory dialog (which we do want to give to end-users in some form, as it helps them gather information for certain classes of bug reports), but I simply. did. not. have. time. to. do. the. requisite. surgery. on. the. bloody. interface. code. to. fix. it. before. the. release. thank. you.
Oh and if you could get Inkscape into Garnome[1] I'd be a lot more likely to build it occasionally and perhaps others would too.
Yes, how about it? Any volunteers out there?
It's good to raise these things periodically, and in fact I suspect some of them will get addressed soon because they've been raised now.
But, if stuff doesn't get done for a long period of time, _acting hurt when the existing developers don't adopt your priorities_ (regardless of how good they may be in their own right) doesn't help anything.
It leaves people feeling like they are expected to be your personal monkeys.
If you feel something particularly important is simply not getting addressed, make a patch, or if the particular work is beyond your means, try soliciting volunteers who aren't already overworked to do it.
Then we can discuss the actual merits of the patch, instead of "why should I work on this rather than something else?" It also puts an end to theoretical arguments about what is feasible.
I could be mistaken regarding that paths versus shapes distinction, for example, but at this point I'm not going to devote fifteen hours to proving myself right or wrong on that point in preference to other work.
-mental