This is a peculiarity of the GTK developers, not anything to do with systemd or fd.o. I maintained a popular GTK-but-explicitly-not-GNOME application long before the days of systemd and they had the same attitude.
Poettering has come with very similar claims that betray that he does not understand what people outside of his small circle want and need, the same can be said for Wayland developers, DBus, NetworkManager, PulseAudio and all such other infamous projects.
QT developers will not tell you “I have no idea what LXQt is or does.”; they do not generally break things that compromise 90% of their consumer base and they do not remove theming because they fear it's existence will hurt the “brand identity” of KDE.
It's dishonest to say similar problems occur outside of the Red Hat circle and that circle alone is commonly criticized on these policies.
If you're trying to prove a point, you could at least mention something that actually caused a real problem instead of taking this one out of context. I have no idea why anyone would keep mentioning this quote or find it memorable, it seems completely insignificant to me. You also seem to be ignoring all the positive interactions this engineer (or any other Red Hat engineer) might have had. I can personally name a lot of instances where Red Hat engineers have fixed upstream bugs that were affecting me. And just to make it clear I'm not saying this to single them out for praise, a lot of other companies fix upstream bugs too. That's how open source is supposed to work.
And you actually could go and search around on old mailing lists to find similarly questionable 11-year-old quotes from Qt developers if you really were interested in digging up more old drama. These things happen everywhere that people go because people don't agree on everything. I suspect you also think that's ultimately futile though, so why keep flogging this particular dead horse? This is still way, way outside the scope of discussion for systemd anyway.
Or what, is everyone except you under thrall to Lennart Poettering, master wizard?
I have very specifically only criticized Red Hat developers. I have no problem with any of the others and they don't show the same problems.
But that raises the real question: If the problem is systemd, and the problem is so bad, why do you only blame Red Hat and not the every other distribution that switched to it? Do you think they were all victims of Tricksy Lennart, or?
And you also brought in SuSE, Arch, and KDE, which I never criticized to make your argument that I simply hate everything work, which is quite disingenuous.
> But that raises the real question: If the problem is systemd, and the problem is so bad, why do you only blame Red Hat and not the every other distribution that switched to it? Do you think they were all victims of Tricksy Lennart, or?
I do not, and have never blamed distributions for switching to systemd.
They can use what they want and it's neither their fault nor problem that systemd and other Red Hat projects are known to create dependencies upon one another for ill technical merit.
I have criticized Red Hat projects for creating dependencies on other Red Hat projects for political, rather than technical reasons; the rest is simply your putting words into my mouth to make a straw-man argument function.