I, and a lot of people, are willing to spend time configuring the environment until it fits like a glove. When we have to upgrade, what we want is for that to just continue to work, but with bugs fixed.
In practice we wind up having to reconfigure to get back to the same state as before. And this makes us want to avoid upgrading. This also makes people who care not be involved in development - after all our environments are as we want them to be, and we want that to get out of our way so that we continue to work. So developers never hear from us unless something breaks. And then we're upset.
When an upgrade means getting rid of the way that we are used to working, we get unhappy. Therefore people who develop desktops do not like people like me. I can understand that. But I still do not appreciate the arrogance and condescension that I see coming from desktop developers towards people like me.
I personally have no idea why people get involved with developing desktops. It is not something that interests me. It is clear when I read what they say that they do not want anything resembling what I want.
My ideal desktop almost used to be fvwm2 - maximum real estate, multiple screens, no "helpful (mis)features" that I didn't want. The only missing feature on my wishlist is to have multiple monitors, with the monitors cycling independently through screens. But many years back Debian integrated their version of fvwm2 into Gnome, and things stopped working properly. (This was long enough ago that I no longer remember what broke - just that it did break.)
I developed a dislike of the Gnome project back then, which I've never seen anything to dissuade me from.