> Saying that it's nitpicky to include this in your list would be huge understatement, it's straight out ridiculous.

There's a bug report about it with lots of duplicates and 71 votes. I use Ctrl+W to close tabs, so losing work in other tabs is just one key away. For me, it isn't nitpicky.

> having a flashier UI would address and (potentially) attract more users.

You don't know that though. You think it will attract more users.

You'll need some kind of metric to know what people really want. "Gets often repeated in discussions" is one, "which bug reports get voted on" is another.