>However, most software engineers are bad at creating user-friendly products unless someone with product design skills tells them exactly what the UX should look like
Absolutely Wrong!
Absolutely Wrong!
(I still prefer FOSS, but user-friendliness is not where it shines.)
Also, your original statement didn't say anything about FOSS:
> [...] most software engineers are bad at creating user-friendly products unless someone with product design skills tells them exactly what the UX should look like, [...]
The software engineers I've worked with want to make user-friendly software that meets needs. You know what usually gets in their way? They're not able to work with the end users to understand what the destination should be. They're fed streams (tides!) of loose feature requests with no apparent cohesion. What kind of software do you expect to get out of this process?
Garbage in, garbage out.
Every successful project I've been part of has required me to meet directly with the customer and understand what isn't working. Asking someone else to ask the customer for a specification just leads to the wrong solutions being solved or an endless stream of feature requests that make no sense in isolation.
Can you provide one example ?
because gnome is FOSS and I have heard complaint it's 'too simple'
and https://birchtree.me/blog/screwing-up-the-simplicity-of-it-a... : "Most people get maybe 2% of the potential of their Macs and Windows PCs today. Have you watched most people use a computer laterly? Most people I see have all apps in full screen all the time, no matter how big their screen is. Most people I see use keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, opening new tabs, but basically nothing else. I've seen numer ous Mac users download apps, open the DMG, and run the app from the DMG forever because they don't know you should move it to the Applications folder. Many people have a desktop full of files because the desktop is the file system."
(and SAP and any Oracle Enterprise products...)