[vayup]

Spot on. Defending simplicity takes a lot of energy and commitment. It is not sexy. It is a thankless job. But doing it well takes a lot of skill, skill that is often disparaged by many communities as "political non sense"[1]. It is not a surprise that free software world has this problem.

But it is not a uniquely free software world problem. It is there in the industry as well. But the marketplace serves as a reality check, and kills egregious cases.

[1] Granted, "Political non sense" is a dual-purpose skill. In our context, it can be used both for "defending simplicity", as well as "resisting meaningful progress". It's not easy to tell the difference.

[jacobr1]

The cycle repeats frequently in industry. New waves of startups address a problem with better UX, and maybe some other details like increased automated and speed using more modern architectures. But feature-creep eventually makes the UX cumbersome, the complexity makes it hard to migrate to new paradigms or at least doing so without a ton of baggage, so they in turn are displaced by new startups.

[gmueckl]

If the last part was true, Autodesk and Adobe would have had to go under a decade ago.