>Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects.

No. You're confusing a normal disagreement with disrespect. There's nothing disrespectful about saying "no we're not going to implement this." I assume from this confusion that you don't work in this field. If you work as a developer you get used to saying things like that all the time. Most users don't understand code. Why would they? Users come at developers with all kinds of requests, some good and some bad, and it's the developers' job to make a decision to say yes or no.

>Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate

Cooperate with who? If you want them to cooperate with you, then you need to respect them. That way they'll owe you the respect you give them. That means putting aside all the past anger you might have and practicing forgiveness. Put aside any old opinions you had and start fresh. This isn't related to GNOME by the way, this is for any project that you may have a disagreement with. Just think how this would be if the situations were switched and somebody wanted something from you for free. The ball is completely in your court because they're not the ones going on social media making long posts about how you should write some code for them!

>It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem.

Unfortunately in this case it's neither. I can name some times when GNOME screwed up communications but this one isn't that.

>I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground.

There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. I see the problem, what you're not seeing is that the problem isn't fixable in the way you think it is. You still seem to think this is a "stance" or "opinion" that some developer has and not an unchangeable fact of the code. Why? If you can't explain this well then maybe consider that you're not qualified to be commenting on it?

>and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps

This already happened, have a look at what ElementaryOS is doing.

>Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this.

I can list a bunch but I don't want to. I don't bother discussing my own opinions about GNOME on HN any more because every time I do, people who hold opinions like yours use it as an excuse to turn it into a GNOME hate-fest flamewar and start harassing the developers, calling them shitty bad people who deserve to get their reputations trashed. That stuff is unacceptable. I'm serious here when I say this. In my opinion it's your attitude that's poisoning the well. And this is why I use a throwaway account to discuss this by the way. For whatever reason the moderators here think it's ok for this to be a place where trolls and conspiracy theorists run amok. I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end.