> It's not GNOME that's crazy; it's literally everybody else [1][2][3][4][5][6[][7][8][9][10] that's ever tried to work with GNOME! They must be out to get you.

You're just Gish galloping to make yourself feel better. A lot of people being angry with a project doesn't actually necessarily imply that that project is inherently the bad guy. That's bandwagon thinking: "if the majority of people agree with me, then I must be right."

It can also just indicate a set of expectations that have become culturally ingrained and common in the community — like the idea that open source projects have some kind of obligation to bend over backwards to satisfy every whim of downstream developers and users, even when it conflicts with the upstream developer's vision for their own project — that clash with the beliefs and values of the project "everyone" is getting frustrated with. It can also indicate a culture of groupthink and bandwagoning and mob mentality, where everyone decides they're going to hate on a project and it becomes a self reinforcing cycle. Or it can just mean that the project in question just isn't really meant to be taken and adapted by other projects, because it's its own product, not a tinker toy kit, and so everyone is mad at it because they're expecting it to be something it isn't and hasn't been for over a decade, just because people want to takw advantage of the free labor of the GNOME team in building their product while also having their every whim satisfied. (IMO Miny and System76 have the right idea — fork GNOME or build something totally else — maybe set up a consortium of distros to manage a common GNOME fork? — if you don't like GNOME being GNOME).

I read through, in their entirety, every source you cite up to and including source 5, which I think is more than fair of me considering the Gish Gallop you're trying to put over on me, and all I see are meaningless petty grievances over minor design disagreements due to the entitlement of downstream developers, mostly about meaningless things like app indicators and themes, where everyone wants GNOME to conform to their vision of the next desktop and not their own just for their convenience. None of it seems like a smoking gun to justify hyperbolic claims of GNOME trying to sabotage other project's products out of a desire for market gain or something, or being "just like Microsoft" or anything else, unless you think the very idea of a DE or other project wanting to have its own vision and stick to it is illegitimate, in which case you should be railing against Void Linux for not using systemd, Alpine for not using glibc by default, DWM for not having themes and extensions, etc etc etc. But you don't.

And it's very interesting to me that when System76 displays similar behavior to the GNONE team, like when The GNOME team offered to make some of their extensions part of upstream so they'd get maintained by upstream by default, but pointed out that TypeScript didn't really work with GJS (I've read S76's source code, to get it to work it requires an ad hoc see script), and asked System 76 to consider rewriting the extension, and System 76 refused, or System 76 refusing to work with and accept the firmware standard that everyone was unifying on, you consider this evidence of the vilification of systems of the six, and not evidence of bad behavior on their part.

Or the transparent double standard you display between distro developers and upstream gnome developers, where the distro developers flatly refusing to align with and integrate with the vision of the Upstream project whose work they are picking backing off of is viewed as totally fine it accepted, but gnome refusing to align themselves with the vision of the people downstream from then is somehow evil, when it seems just about equal to me.

And honestly I genuinely do not see the problem with gnome being able to make design decisions about their own fucking desktop however they want, and asking distros to please stop doing the shit Android oems do to Android to gnome and randomly see me and slapping on all kinds of cruft and extensions from the "factory". Also, the idea that the police stop theming post was meant to be a directed targeted dig at System 76 is just utterly nonsensical and overly sensitive, and the fact that you can't see that I think demonstrates what's going on here. There are far many more, much larger, downstream projects that theme. Also, before you raise it, seeming isn't really any better supported on KDE than it is under GNOME, it can break things just as easily, the KDE devs just don't care (which is fine).

> There's genuinely something strange going on with the mindset around the whole project; it's like they've actively weeded out anybody with any functioning empathy, self-awareness, or non-zero neuroplasticity…

But I see you opened with needless insults and generalizations, so I don't think this conversation is going to go anywhere productive. I recommend you go touch grass.