An experienced developer should be mature enough to know that he and his kind should not be the target audience of his product. And putting in all those little checkboxes makes a product a horrible experience for the rest of the world.
If you don't pay me, I will still contribute, but then I will work only to scratch my own itch. I will implement features, but only those I want to have myself; I will fix bugs, but only those that annoy me personally; I will write some documentation, sometimes.
If you don't pay me, and your project goals make it impossible for me to scratch my itch, then I will not contribute to it.
And that said, it doesn't need to be so difficult to include all these pesky checkboxes in a way that they don't confuse or hinder usability for n00bish users. This used to work for Gnome 2. Never met anyone who thought Gnome 2 was too hard or counter-intuitive, they were just more or less used to it. Windows XP and Windows 7 have a lot more checkboxes if you look for them.
If there's one thing that Apple and even Microsoft are showing with their window manager and widgets, its that simpler is better, and we've been missing that all these years.
Whether you call Gnome 2 hard or easy, it's main problem was that it's configuration apps and menus were confusingly organized. If the incremental improvements Ubuntu was making could have continued a few more years, things might have been great. The decision to create "Gnome shell" probably forced Canonical's hand but Unity also seems terrible to me.
I like solving problems for other people. But when I'm using open-source software, the only problems I'm really aware of are the ones I'm having.
In a commercial setting, I'm very motivated by user tests or data that demonstrates problems people are having. I've seen a lot of other developers get excited about that, too. Fixing things is fun when you can see that your actions actually help somebody.
But I've never seen an open-source project that makes it easy to get engaged in that fashion. The closest I've seen is users asking support questions on the mailing lists, which is a pretty small slice of users these days. Plugins also seem to provide a nice feedback loop like that: you make something for yourself, you throw it out there, and you see people installing it and commenting.
But broadly it seems like an unsolved problem in consumer-facing open source.
Too bad Gnome developers are so far removed from UX and the desires of the "common user" it isn't funny
They took "removing stuff" as their mission and follow it blindly.
Or for a car analogy: Gnome removes the clutch but it doesn't give a torque converter and automatic transmission.
Open source is very much about scratching one's own itch
Perhaps better questions to ask would be what is Gnome 3? What is Gnome Shell? And what is Gnome? Sorry but it's a bit difficult to comment on Gnome when it's not entirely clear as to what it is.
The thing is, they could switch to a qt based desktop, without touching any unity code.
Personally, I moved away from gnome when 2.4 (or maybe it was 2.6) took out the "launch a terminal" option from the desktop right-click menu.
That to me feels like a very nice hierarchy:
A few basic, common options available in the main UI.
A few more-advanced/less-commonly-desired options available in a part of the UI that's labeled "Advanced". Things that mortals-but-not-noobs would be interested in. Novices actively don't want to hit Advanced but the sort of user that would be interested in these options goes right for it.
Then really exotic options are available through an interface that takes up absolutely no UI space but is easily accessible by most of the kind of people that would want such things.
Where you do see lots of "Advanced…" buttons is in System Preferences…
Security & Privacy
(Displays - Calibrate has an "expert mode")
Mail, Contacts & Calendars - for manual mail accounts
Network - big advanced section
Bluetooth
(Zoom in Accessibility has "More Options...")
By the same token there's no way to do this for the web. (you can override style sheets willy nilly but don't expect a lot of stuff to work).
I suggest you might need to get used to reading text on backgrounds that aren't a "pleasing greenish" color, write all your own software, or learn to live in a world of pain.
Instead of allowing people to set the default edit field background to magenta (which windows does) Apple spent engineering effort on, say, universal access.
It doesn't have to. The measure of a good product, as far as I'm concerned, is the extent to which it can retain all the power the power-users want, while still keeping things simple enough for the non-power-users. OR, better yet, the extent to which it can help non-power-users become power-users.
Motivation goes beyond money.
Why is sane defaults and hidden options a lousy user experience?
You need an easy way to get as close to vanilla as possible, to make support and faultfinding not awful. But you need to provide some kind of hidden method for tweaking to keep power users happy.