Open software runs the gamut from anarchic, to focused community development, to benevolent dictatorship, all the way to closed-development models, and I can cite success stories from all of those approaches. Just pointing out that Blender isn't a good example of design by committee, it's still essentially the same program it was when the Blender Foundation was established.
I completely disagree. Blender's interface has undergone a large number of revisions since the original program was launched, even prior to its giant 2.5 rewrite.
I chose Blender as an example in part because I think its single-company origins make it a better example of how Open committees can improve UX. Blender in the early-to-mid 2000s had a strong reputation for being unintuitive and hard to use. It's only because of some really hard work from a dedicated community that Blender doesn't have that same reputation today -- and I don't think it's a terribly controversial claim to say that Blender's close relationship with artists has been one of the elements that has elevated it so far above other art tools on Linux (see Gimp), and that has allowed it to make so many smart iterations on its UX over the years.
> and I can cite success stories from all of those approaches
Sure, I do agree with that. I didn't mean to suggest that the community development model is the only way to write software; just that the community development model is a viable way to write software (especially for creative tools) and that it shouldn't be dismissed.
There are several 'auteur' style programs that I love that I think would have benefited from having more community involvement in their UX design. Git has a wonderfully elegant core; it definitely benefited from having a single person come up with the idea. But the CLI that was built around that core is really bad, and would have benefited tremendously from having more input.
There are also a lot of single-dev OS efforts that shine. But I don't think that's the only way to design software, or that community-run design should be dismissed because they exist.
As I get older, I have more moments where I'm saying to myself, but I've used Blender! It's kinda unintuitive and hard to use! and then realize that, er, that was in 2010, and it's now a solid decade past that...
I happen to think the common narrative of git having good plumbing and bad porcelain is still considerably overselling the virtues of that program, but, that's a topic for some other thread.
But for standard development (and with some sort of gitflow) most people need only ten or so commands to operate an otherwise complex algorithm for diffing and merging code, compared to the inexorably complicated UIs which at best offer the basic ten and then usually ten more random local idioms, or at worst don't offer the basics and still have the extra complexity...and then offer to drop you to shell for anything else...
I've worked on enough commercial software to know that most large, practical products aren't designed from an auteur perspective, and that many that are, shouldn't be. My perspective on game development is different than it is for tools -- some of the most impressive OS tools I've seen (Blender, Krita) are where they are specifically because they've been designed by committee, and because it turns out that a committee of artists generally produces better art-tools than a committee of programmers and marketers.
> The community can maintain stuff that is "boring," where there is no controversy. When the right approach is clear to all. The community can write an emulator, but cannot write a video game.
A good 90% of the tools where reliability matters are boring, and I want them to be boring. I compare this to other tools that I use outside of a computer. I don't want a radical piano when I'm composing music, I want a finely tuned, boring solution. I don't want radical pencils, I do most of my artwork with tools that I know extremely well.
When I picked up digital drawing, my approach was the same; I didn't want an auteur experience, I wanted extremely consistent drivers, and consistent software that allowed me to focus on my artwork, not the user interface.
I think you're hitting on an interesting artistic point with game development, but you're misapplying that point to a field with different concerns. I use Linux because it's boring. It gets out of my way and lets me focus on creative tasks.