I would really like to know where this bizzare attitude has come from. At what point exactly did the gnome devs decide that they were at war with their users?
GNOME developers have been well known twats for a long long time. They tinker and remove things for the better all the time, usually sighting some crap UX survey or some such nonsense. They also have a passionate hatred of giving users choice.
UX surveys are crap? How is blindly implementing something any better than listening to UX surveys?
He said "some crap UX survey", not "UX surveys are crap".
this isn't new - it was several years ago - imo this goes back at least 10 years.