> developers. For desktops, you have third-party theme authors as well as application developers, people that want to work on the desktop software itself, maintainers of other Linux OS components, and folks that want to use the source code to build their own custom projects.

I think they are part of the "possibility to customize-everything" crowd. The most important point for me in a distribution is its security record and a good package system to support all common use-cases. The default desktop should totally be targeted to casual users, as experienced users will not agree with your base-configuration system anyway (I remember YAST from SUSE), so I appreciate strong opinions there, in particular less is more (the original Ubuntu approach compared to other distributions at the time).