Yeah... I know the tactic and you want me to go for a hunt of some comment somewhere. Otherwise it's a dismissal.
I'll just use common sense and say that all the evident effort that is put into Desktop environments and user applications is not just to keep their (tiny) user base happy or to be used less.
I doubt it. I have never seen anyone in the Ubuntu community for example claiming that their goal is the "mass adoption" of Ubuntu. That's, obviously, an impossible pipe dream. Can you provide recent examples?