GoboLinux Is a Linux Distro Unlike Any Other
linuxiac.com
linuxiac.com
Dozens of man-years of developer effort and productivity consumed by the technological dustbin and evaporated into the digital ether.
Open source lacks direction and focus --- which is not an issue if your time has no value. But back in the real world, time is limited and is thus the most valuable thing you can spend. Spend wisely with the awareness that reality can not be defeated.
All of those things can be extremely valuable uses of one's time, even if you assume that the product itself had absolutely zero value to anyone.
Open source has brought us substantial innovations over the years. On the distro side NixOS for example. Tiling window managers like i3 are another.
If all development time is spent on something coordinated by a committee, we wouldn't see such pearls emerge. They'd consider it way too risky or too different from what they already have.
And really all companies already use that centrally directed model. FOSS is a good counterbalance for this. That not all the work is receiving the attention it deserves doesn't really matter. And some ideas just don't work out but at least they were tried. IMO it's all good if it makes the developers and the people that do use it happy.