Seems to be the same sort of magic words as ”considered harmful”……. instantly credible and worthy of consideration.
I really should frame all of my grumbles about the state of the world as “open letters” so people pay attention.
Search this very website for the term and sort by popularity, then start from the last page. See how many you ever even knew existed.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&prefix=false&query=ope...
Sometimes letters are about love, sometimes they're insulting, sometimes they're ambivalent, sometimes they're begging, sometimes they're threatening. So letters can be a lot of things, but they're fundamentally letters, and some letters are open, like this one.
The authors here called their letter an open letter because that's what it is. If you think it's just a whining email, that's a you thing, that's your own personal interpretation of the letter. I personally would not call it a whining email. It's a letter with people raising their genuine heartfelt thoughts.
All open letters are expressions of dissatisfaction.
As such, calling it an "open letter" might have bigger chances of success, even though (and judging by the responses of many of the people here), I don't think that those chances are that big to begin with.
Either way, shameful conduct by the PSF, I used to look up to them ~20 years ago when I started learning Python.