I was an Ubuntu user at the time. From an outsider's perspective Ubuntu Touch thing looked so promising... then everything went sideways
The worst was one day at a big sprint... the VP of Business gave an all-hands powerpoint presentation right after the workday ended, with a catered dinner afterward. He looked and spoke like a caricature of an Italian mobster, and spent 45 minutes gleefully explaining exactly how we were going to screw the user to make more profit, by taking control away from the user and giving that control to phone corporations. Like, selling corps the ability to place ads directly onto the user's home screen. He was so excited he was practically vibrating.
Afterward, I just went straight to my hotel room and cried.
Eventually, the phone project was cancelled because it had failed pretty spectacularly, for exactly the reasons everyone said it would... and upper management laid off nearly the entire Ubuntu Engineering business unit, about a third or a quarter of the company. The people in charge had decided the problem wasn't a bad design... it was just all those uppity devs who wouldn't follow orders. They kept the managers who were responsible for making it fail, and got rid of all the devs who tried to warn management that the "vision" was broken.
At least sabdfl seemed somewhat aware of the situation... aware of how bad it was. A day or two beforehand, he started the day by giving everyone a pep talk. The talk was pretty somber, talking about how we were supposed to have a mature product to launch by now, but instead we were cancelling the launch and hoping for an optimistic scenario where some tech magazines would at least say it "showed potential". The best case scenario he could muster for the team's motivation was ... we might get a couple reviews stating that it could eventually be good someday, with enough work.