Instead of collecting more data why don't do something with the data we already have? A quick look at the Fedora Bugzilla or the GNOME GitLab issues tab suggests the bottleneck doesn't lie in data collection, but in processing.
It's a black box with no incentive to participate unless you're one of those specific types of users that is dedicated enough to put up with all of that, or users that have never done it before and are trying hard to contribute back.
Some metrics like startup time and crash counts lead to clear improvement, while others like pointer heatmaps and even more invasive focus tracking are highly dubious in my opinion.
On a related note, I’m coming to the opinion that A/B testing is harder to pull off than many think. And serving a single user both A and B at any point can confuse them and get in the way of their trusting the consistency of the software. Much like how when you search for something twice and get different results in Apple Maps. OK, now I’m just ranting…
Now, with telemetry, they can say quantifiable things like "we've driven catastrophic root filesystem loss and permanent loss of network connectivity to 0% of installs!", and prioritize any contrary bug reports away in a data-driven, quantifiable way.
(Because, of course, weak telemetry signals are more valuable than actual humans taking the time to give you feedback on your product.)
As coined here (copy and paste the link into your browser if you don't want a 'surprise' from jwz) ttps://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Now how long until someone reinvents peer to peer networking or document databases again…
I absolutely detest that Catch-22 argument, which some distro (not Fedora) actually tried to use on me in the past.
I created a bug report [1] for tigervnc-server in Fedora because the Fedora documentation [2] for setting up a VNC server didn't match any more what was coming from dnf.
In the bug report I provided the info that would need to be fixed in the documentation. Now after two months, seemingly nothing has been done to fix the situation.
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2193384
[2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-ad...
I figure it must be due to an abdication of responsibility-- absent information, the product must at least appeal to someone working on it who is making decisions about what is good and what isn't, and so it will also appeal to people who share their preferences. But with the power of DATA we can design products for the 'average user' which can be a product that appeals to no single person at all!
Imagine that you were making shirts. To try to appeal to the most number of people, you make a shirt sized for the average person. But if the distribution of sizes is multimodal or skewed the mean may be a size that fits few or even absolutely no one. You would have done better picking a random person from the factory and making shirts that fit them.
When your problem has many dimensions like system functionality, the number of ways you can target an average but then fit no one as a result increases exponentially.
Pre-corporatized open source usually worked like fitting the random factory worker: developers made software that worked for them. It might not be great for everyone, but it was great for people with similar preferences. If it didn't fit you well you could use a different piece of software.
In corportized open source huge amounts of funding goes into particular solutions, they end up tightly integrated. Support for alternatives are defunded (or just eclipsed by better funded but soulless rivals). You might not want to use gnome, but if you use KDE, you may find fedora's display subsystem crashes out any time you let your monitor go to sleep or may find yourself unable to configure your network interfaces (to cite some real examples of problems my friends of experienced)-- you end up stuck spending your life essentially creating your own distribution, rather than saving the time that you hoped to save by running one made by someone else.
Of course, people doing product design aren't idiots and some places make an effort to capture multimodality though things like targeting "personas"-- which are inevitably stereotyped, patronizing, and overly simplified (like assuming a teacher can't learn to use a command prompt or a bug tracker). Or through efforts like user studies but these are almost always done with very unrepresentative users, people with nothing better to do then get paid $50 to try someting out, and you learn only about the experience of people with no experience and no real commitment or purpose to their usage (driving you to make an obscenely dumbed down product). ... or by things like telemetry, which even at their best will fail to capture things like "I might not use the feature often, but it's a huge deal in the rare events I need it." or get distorted by the preferences of day-0 users, some large percentage of which will decide the whole thing isn't for them no matter what you do.
So why would non-idiots do things that don't have good results? As sibling posts note, people are responding to the incentives in their organizations which favor a lot of wheel spinning on stuff that produces interesting reports. People wisely apply their efforts towards their incentives-- their definition of a good result doesn't need to have much relation to any external definition of good.