I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.

Unfortunately it’s the reason indeed

Basically. This is the same problem with FreeCAD. They just don't care.

I think its more issue of not knowing how (efficiently). Consistent UX and polished UI is often about saying no to many ideas and people. This requires someone calling the shots which is hard for community projects.

FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.

Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2].

[1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465