A piece of this issue is distributions, and it somewhat might be better for rolling release distros.

Also, at least for his examples, these are fairly low popularity products, as much as I like Gnome[0] and its ecosystem, it's the truth. Shotwell? He said it himself, no one develops it anymore. Epiphany (vs. Firefox vs. Chrome) Gnome Music, Weather? It doesn't help that the userbase is small and thus, the developer base is even smaller.

Would we see the same apathy with Firefox, VLC, mplayer, not to mention bash or openssl? Probably not (as we have seen especially with the last two).

[0] Not being sarcastic, imao, Gnome 3 blows Unity,Gnome 2,KDE, and even OS X out of the water in my book, which makes me sad it isn't as popular as Unity.