In fact larger open source GUI projects also tend to suffer from the opposite: with multiple equally powerful maintainers, a good number of contributors, and no one to rally them behind a coherent design, you get a messy bag of poorly documented features spread all over the place. Design by programmer is usually bad enough; design by a loosely-connected web of programmers working almost independently is even worse. Also, a lot of the developers/users are ideologically motivated and heavily invested, when you point out how bad the software is for the average user, instead of reflecting on it they often get defensive.