There are two (maybe three) nominal 'people' in this particular circle of hell, one is the developer who originally felt that the message of the day should reflect something important without having to actually edit it every day. One is the guy who wants the motd to have something different in it. Culturally the first guy is the 'lazy' type (in quotes because it reflects the culture of "hey I've got a computer here the more work it does the less I do" which is a popular meme in system administrator circles and elsewhere) and the other is the 'KISS' type (where KISS is the 'keep it simple stupid' type of person who oftens stresses simplicity over mechanism. The third (perhaps absent) person is the 'systems' person/distro owner who imposes an implicit design guideline on the system by virtue of the changes they accept or don't, commit or don't into what becomes the final product. In the kernel tree this is clearly Linus but in other parts of the system it isn't always clear whether or not there even is someone in this role.
Underlying this I find a strong sense of frustration at changes that are made to 'small, meaningless' parts of the system when large parts sit there on fire. Of course not everyone can fix bugs in EXT4 or memory leaks in long running daemons, everyone needs to start somewhere, and sometimes changing the colors around in ls(1) so that the default is unreadable on your favorite color scheme is probably some 'starter project' of someone who wants to become a bigger part of the solution.
It is the experience you get when you use Linux, and that experience is an artifact of how Linux is created. So hating it isn't particularly productive, although like UNIX-haters before it rooted in much the same arguments.