Lots of arguing in this thread, but all I know that my impression as an outsider is that the developers of Blender (volunteers or otherwise) seem disorganized when it comes to Ux/Ui with no clear central guidance on vision or direction, no structured procedures for making Ux/Ui changes and no procedures at all for the gathering and documentation of user feedback.
This may very well be wrong, but I’ve seen very little evidence against this so far.
It’s now been over a year since Ton Rosendaal said the following:
“Having Epic Games on board is a major milestone for Blender,” said Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to the grant we will make a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality. As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects.”
I feel this supports my view that Blender puts the technical aspect in front of everything else, but regardless of its technical excellence, a feature that the user doesn’t know about, or doesn’t know how to use, is the same as that feature not existing.
I agree with this open letter and I do hope that what Mr. Ronsendaal said will extend to Ux/Ui as well (does anyone know if anything of it has been documented yet?).