I'm not familiar with the GNOME story, but removing features takes courage and is actually a form of sincerity.
A developer team can be insincere and avoid outrage by just leaving half-broken features in the software, stop testing them, and ignore all complaints about it. Low quality and inactivity doesn't make for as good a story on social media.
>but removing features takes courage and is actually a form of sincerity
That is false, say I remove the feature X because reason A but I tell everyone that is for reason B. So I had the courage to remove X but I did not the courage to be sincere, maybe I am not sincere with myself and the real reason A is that the code was written by somebody else in the past and I want to implement new cool shit and not read somebody else code, but I can't admit that I don't care about feedback because I might be replaced as a project leader so I invent bullshit excuses like blame the previous developers that wrote bad code, blame the user that are using it wrong or invent some bullshit UX story with no real user tests to push my egotistic vision on everyone else because I am really an Apple fan but I could only get a job to work for RedHat
A developer team can be insincere and avoid outrage by just leaving half-broken features in the software, stop testing them, and ignore all complaints about it. Low quality and inactivity doesn't make for as good a story on social media.