No need to be sorry, I'm not the designer in this story -- I'm the grumpy sofware engineer, and nowadays sometimes the manager. I'm also a desktop Linux user who is regularly annoyed by the sad and confusing state of opensource UX. What makes me so pessimistic is that I know the social dynamics that typically cause this, and have seen them play out in lots and lots of mailing list discussions.

Of course that's not a logical inevitability, things can change with more understanding. Your link actually makes me very happy, I hadn't seen this. Let's hope that this works out, and becomes a model that more OSS project can follow.