Sometimes, nobody inside cares what *you* think
I've seen this before. One or another person on an open source dev team decides that something is just "not a problem" and it doesn't matter how many outside people say "WTF?!" No arguments will help to move the issue. In this article's case only shaming the entire team worked.
In my favorite illustration is the "Firefox won't do SVG fonts" issue. Opened in 2002, after ~150 comments it was closed in 2013 with "Oh, poo, implementation of SVG embedded in OpenType fonts will fix your problem." An experimental proposed feature that is still not standardized or accepted by other browsers over a year later.
It didn't even matter when an outside company offered to fund the development of an implementation with their own devs, FF devs simply said "Oh, but SVG fonts are just so ucky!" "Why, you can't even do font hinting with SVG, can you?" So obviously no implementation was ever so much better than a flawed implementation, right?
And the pleas kept coming in, with increasingly exasperated replies of "but you just don't understand our (FF devs) position of 'No'. How rude of you!"
So over 12 years later FF still doesn't have anything to offer and will not be swayed!. A big enough closed-minded open source team will quite well replicate the worst parts of the commercial experience.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
