This assumes companies don't make mistakes. They do. A lot.
And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.
Generally, RHEL does exactly what RHEL customers want. They are extremely loyal to their user base.
The issues come when these changes set a trend and ripple to the rest of the community, and affect people who would never become a RH customer in the first place (e.g. anti-systemd fanatics)
But this is still an odd statement. Previous customers who very much relied on LibreOffice might move to some other platform or at least some other support service. Thus they would no longer be Redhat customers and Redhat would still be loyal to their customers.
I suspect the number of RHEL Workstation customers to be a relatively small part of Redhat's customer base. And those that depend on LO support to be even smaller. I don't expect this to affect RH's bottom line in any negative way.
Are you sure it's not the other way around? :-(
The commentary of users on LWN and HN may be interesting, but not likely to be representative of those paying for RHEL on desktop/workstation. (I’m talking about sizable accounts here, not small shops that might be paying a little.)
I am no longer at Red Hat but in my experience the product marketing managers, and product managers, and account folks had a pretty good finger on the pulse of their customers.
Something "making sense" does not mean mistakes are not possible.
Assuming only idiots make mistakes is rather black-and-white.