Please remember: GNOME is a loosely connected group of volunteers all working on what they want to work on. If one person says they're prioritizing something and another person says they're going to do something else, that's not hypocrisy, that's just a difference of opinion. I know it may be confusing when one person says one thing and another person says something different but this is something you have to get used to in open source, it's not like a company where the CEO tells everyone what to do. Some developers may choose to listen to certain community members and may choose to ignore other community members, sadly that has to happen in any project where the wider community outnumbers the developers. Every interested person can't get their way all the time because resources are limited.
>They claim to respect your freedom, but force you to use Flatpaks and obfuscate their own code to prevent you from getting consistent app theming
This statement doesn't make sense to me. Flathub lists the license of the program and most packages are open source. And I have no idea what you mean by "obfuscate their own code" or "consistent app theming", could you elaborate? The suggested way to get consistent app theming is to stick with the Adwaita theme, if you're installing custom themes then that's guaranteed to be inconsistent.
>Here's hoping they can iron out all of the (many, many) issues before the next major release.
If there are issues that you want to see fixed, the best way to help that would be to contribute.