What's more, even if somebody did understand this, any concerns would have fallen on deaf ears as Nokia also had a culture of corporate arrogance. It saw itself as too big & successful to fail. They could make whatever mistakes, but it was alright because they could always revisit and make better decisions later. I don't think they fully realized how wrong they were even years after the Android/iOS duopoly had already solidified - considering how immense amounts of money they kept spending (under M$) in trying to bootstrap the Windows Phone ecosystem that was always destined to fail.
I loved my N8. Built-in FM transmitter was awesome. And don't get me started on how many times it got dropped and laughed it off. At least 50 times onto concrete and such.
On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI elements were designed to be small. Only after they completely overhauled the UI (and renamed the Linux based OS Meego) it could have worked on the N8.
Meego/maemo had several UI redesigns. The issue was that Nokia just kept ripping it apart instead of just fixing it. The reason for the pen was resistive screens. Bigger buttons would have been an OK solution. The later n900 had the same issue. Ultimately, they bought QT to fix Symbian and then made the Meego team switch to that. They wasted years on the UI. Jolla emerged out of the ashes of that and is still around. Samsung's Bada is another descendant.
I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010? was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode that would stay on during the night where they'd only light a few pixels to show a clock.
But it was crippled by the OS; Symbian just wasn't great. And of course it still featured the resistive touch screen instead of a capacitive one (which Apple used).
Meego eventually shipped via the N900 (nice but very awkward form factor) and the only device that could have been great, the N9. Except they launched that years late and with the announcement that whole platform was being cancelled and the phone was for developers only. A misguided UI switch from GTK to QT, which Nokia bought to rescue Symbian did not help either.
Then windows phone started happening and and they unceremoniously killed Symbian. Then they handed the keys to MS. Somewhere in between, Nokia actually shipped a Nokia Android device, which MS promptly killed. Nokia also had another Linux platform (called Meltemi) under development aimed at feature phones. But that whole department got layed off a few months before the MS acquisition. I actually got caught up in that particular round (despite never having worked in that department). In the years after that, tens of thousands of engineers were shown the door. Probably the most bizarre and one of the largest layoff round of highly qualified hardware and software engineers in recent history.
Nokia had a great thing and they ran it straight into the ground. Arrogance and incompetence lead to a lot of bad decision making. The N8 is probably the key moment it went wrong for Nokia. They had all the solutions ready for market and then they chickened out and stuck with Symbian. There was more than a little bit of anger inside the company about that decision. The Symbian camp won and killed the company. Absolutely nothing they tried in the nearly three years that followed worked out.