While you might have the illusion of control, the exit plan to take control is to take on tens of millions of lines of source code and manage it yourself. That is not control.
Your data is the important bit. If you keep that portable and/or recreatable then it doesn't matter what tools you use.
Well now you're just contradicting yourself. I'm not going to say RedHat and fd.o have been perfect all the time or have always made the best decisions or haven't pursued agendas that may have been at odds with others.
But c'mon. On one side you're saying that open source can never be good because no one maintains the cohesiveness and attention span to do "the last 20%", but then you rail on organizations that have tried to set and maintain standards, and reduce fragmentation on the desktop?
You can't have it both ways.
No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes.
> The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.
We haven't, and that's why we prefer operating systems we fully control, instead of being bound by the whims of some foreign megacorporation, enforced by intellectual property law.