Your feelings are valid, and understandable for a piece of software which is so intimately integrated into your daily life. However, allowing those feelings to influence the way you discuss this software seems unwise, especially if you intend to convince the software's developers to change their minds about it. When people feel that core parts of their identity are being attacked, they tend to shut down and stop listening. Developers of complex software like a web browser, who have dedicated large parts of their professional lives to the nitty-gritty details of its creation, surely feel as emotionally attached to it as you do, and they are likely to perceive an attack on it as an attack on themselves. If the impact of this change is so great, then you have a responsibility to present your criticism of it in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of it being received and accepted.

I'm not sure if "responsibility" is the right word. Perhaps there's a responsibility to HN to avoid such language. But I don't think disgruntled users have a responsibility to pose their feedback in a constructive way.

s/you have a responsibility to/it would be most effective if you were to/, perhaps.

Otherwise, I agree with everything you said.

(And hey, I work for Mozilla, though not on UX stuff. When I saw the original description of poor UX, I was planning on checking it myself and possibly filing a bug if I agreed. But once the thread got into "abominations", I lost interest and subconsciously recategorized the complaint as coming from the subset of users who complain loudly and whose opinions I generally find too unrepresentative of more than a small niche. Which could be right or wrong in this case, but I have found it to be a very useful heuristic to consider the constructiveness of criticism as a signal of how useful it would be to examine further.)

Constructive criticism was being given during beta and ignored.

Yikes, posting like this will get you banned here. If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN only in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.

With https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron in my hands i stand my grounds and refuse to be disciplined into mindless tribalism.

We don't want mindlessness either. The scorched earth of internet flamewars, which is the direction your GP post pointed in, is truly mindless. That's the fate we're hoping to avoid here. To maximize signal/noise we need to minimize indignation/information.

Ah, well... I've thought about this, and if i should waste your, or others time by making even more 'noise', or saying nothing at all. There are a few sides to this, one would be that it is a free product, even open source and one is free to either deliver patches or fork it, otherwise there should be no feeling of entitlement at all.

BUT... i've read the whole thread, and the other too, and the only 'signal' between all the 'noise' of annoyed users is more or less: take it or leave it (because we say so)

This is arrogant. And politeness and politically correct speech under all circumstances leads to nothing but mediocrity, while the groupthinking celebrates the emperors new clothes, over and over again. I think sometimes it is necessary to bang the fist hard on the table, to recalibrate the signal processing. If this is too stressful for all the special snowflakes to bear, they maybe should stay in their safe spaces and don't babble about niche minorities. Or maybe smoke less weed?

How can they stop listening if they didn't listen in the first place?

Just because you know words to perfectly describe what you think of a person or thing doesn't mean you should use them.