Yes it's amazingly patronizing to assume that the people were wrong given I rarely see any statistical evidence or usability studies behind GNOME changes. It's quite possible they were right and the GNOME devs were wrong. Or, even more likely, that they are both right for two different groups and that feature X could perhaps be removed from an icon bar but not from a submenu.

Too often in the past GNOME removed the availability of a feature entirely. The people using that feature "owned" it, thus following the first quote the removal impinged on their "property", and then the GNOME devs would insult people for wanting it because it was "wrong", impinging on their "honour". It's only through assuming GNOME devs are infallible and the people are wrong that allows this guy to use the second quote, which boils down to "children want their toys", to cancel the first and then "smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn".

Also I agree with the others regarding the lack of capitalization, but I suppose we are all "wrong" on this.

Yep. I laughed that their response to users complaining about removing features is not to question if the feature was useful or not, but to claim that it is simply the world raging against this idea of its freedom's taken away without any acknowledgement that the feature may have actually been useful.

While I understand gnome gets a lot of hate and that they might take up that tact as a defense mechanism instead of actually dealing with it, it bodes really poorly for their user interface.

Is he trying to imply that he is in charge and we are just those silly peons who don't understand motivation of their ruler? Because that's a complete bullshit.

While I tend to agree with most things they did in the past few years, some are just plain idiotic. For example the type to search instead of prefix matching in nautilus just plain doesn't work, while the original feature have been replaced. I feel like I've received a 7 inch tablet to hack on a C project.

Yes, this. I'm not angry over the removal of compact list mode from Nautilus because of "loss of freedom", but because it's the mode I find superior to all other view modes.

Poe's law applies to the OP - I'm genuinely confused as to whether this blog post is a subtle satire of the uncaring aloofness of Gnome developers, or if it's the real thing.

The no capitals thing is just icing on the cake. "Capitalization is pointless so I removed it"

while Machiavelli isn't bad, I laughed about that too. It fits pretty well.