Eh, this seems a bit presumptuous. I'd be more inclined to suggest that the people who code this projects are usually not designers, and they attract other contributors based on the code not any visual design... so as much as it would be nice for a designer to jump in and work on a visual overhaul I'd expect it to be unfortunately uncommon.

> Simple answers might be open source contributors don’t respect the work designers do as much as other environments (...)

Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that skilled professionals don't work on someone else's hobbies for free?

> Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that skilled professionals don't work on someone else's hobbies for free?

No, because the premise is open source projects which developers, skilled professionals, work on.

My real hypothesis, by the way, is that designers have been trained from early on not to do free work. The “work for exposure” meme captures this pathos.

> No, because the premise is open source projects which developers, skilled professionals, work on.

You do understand that designers do have free will and a developer can't simply order one to work for free on someone else's hobby just because he could use specialized hep, don't you?

It seems you're entirely oblivious to the very nature of FLOSS software, where practically all projects are born as a single individual's hobby, and some of them happen to grow way past the single-developer stage. With that in mind, what exactly leads you to believe that designers have no free will of their own and simply spend their days working on someone else's hobby just because he could use the specialized help?