milady

I NEED TO ARGUE ONLINE ABOUT WORDS HAVING RACIST ORIGINS !!! I WILL NOT PROVIDE ANY VALUE TO THE CONVERSATION !! UNIXPORN IS CLEARLY THE PLACE FOR THAT !!

Not going against Gnome here, but against your last sentence.

As long as they give the user the ability to opt out/in, what's the harm in introducing it?

Pretty sure systemd did this with a lot of things and started removing things they just didn't like. Can't find the website I wanted to link, but it included a lot of reasons why systemd isn't good (for example, binary logging. Why ?) "You can always opt out" doesn't work in the real world ; people don't care enough to switch. Why do you think google is the biggest search engine ? Mainly because it's the default everywhere.

In this context I guess it doesn't matter (and I couldn't see myself using gnome, even if it has some good polish), it's just that "you can always opt out" leaves a bad taste on my tongue.

Did you read the comment

Hamburgers use hamburgers

Oh my sweet summer child

A clunky UI - which is far, far too common on open source applications

So, what are you going to do about it ? Contribute ? Learn the ins and outs of gimp, and propose some UI changes ? And if you don't have time to do that, who does / who cares enough for that ? People who code stuff like GIMP generally don't really care for UI, or have the time. They're volunteers, passionate people. Not designers.

That's also a broad generlization. Firefox has bad UI/UX ? (Sometimes yeah on some niche things but I wholeheartedly believe google is at fault somehow) What about Krita ? Blender has been doing UI work last I heard of it, so that's also that. Paint.net was also open source. Chromium has bad UI ? Android ? Vs Code ? GNOME ? KDE ? Element ? Jitsi ? Signal ? Wordpress ?

Yeah, gimp sucks. And the type of people who are "linux elitists", that tell you you suck for not enjoying bad UI, also suck. But why not make a meaningful change to the world ? Try to hope for a world where GIMP is actually usable ?