When popularity is the goal, you best damn listen to your users. When meeting your needs are the goal, what you do to the users is totally irrelevant. The problem comes when you haven’t decided what your purpose is and then open the flood gates. But that’s a bad project management issue, not a community morale one.

As a user I’m looking for working, debugged, interoperable, and (reasonably) well documented) applications. Preferably with a GUI interface that works the way I’m used to under Windows). Free as in beer is a definite plus; free as in speech is not (unless I want to tinker with it, which is very seldom).

And yes, I’m willing to put up with less than perfect applications, but only if (1) they by and large do what I need right now without me spending hours trying to learn them,
(2) I can’t get any others that are better and
(3) I see improvement.

If those conditions aren’t met, that particular piece of software is just a waste of time for me, and I’ll forget about it at my earliest convenience.

Emacs is a prime example. Possibly great, but count me out. I’m not about to spend my time learning it. Not when there are dozens of other editors that work for me without me having to waste time learning its idiosyncratic ways.

I also have had my fill of rude and condescending OSS developers. Usually that means I just scratch the developers as a possible place to turn to if there are problems and judge the software purely as-is and no longer factor in possible improvements. GNOME is an example. I ditched it in favour of KDE. Partially because of the way it looks and works, but just as much because of the obnoxious devs.

Please note that I’m by no means telling developers how they should go about their business. That’s their affair.

I *am* however telling developers what they need to do if they wish to have me as a user. If that’s too much to ask, I’m often just as happy happy to go away and use commercial software under MS Windows.