"The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis."
Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers.
So it appears to be just a fact that people are developing this in their spare time. That doesn't mean they're less competent than paid developers; of course not. It simply means that compared to a big company, like MS or Apple, they just don't have the same level of cash money resources to hire the right kinds of people--UI design experts--and buy the right kinds of feedback--real-life user testing, focus groups--that big companies do. And that very much shows in these screenshots.
Alpha or not, criticism is essential for furthering the project. If everyone just sat around and said "whew, lots of hard work, good job guys!" to whatever crap any OSS dev produced, OSS would never progress. I want Gnome 3 to be better because I use Gnome every day!
Ahem, "The study found that some 70 percent of contributors are unpaid, but that the majority of commits comes from paid participants." I'm not sure what basis you used to decide that only developers employed at the top five companies count as paid developers.
Have you tried to, instead of calling them "spare-time developers", file a bug report or a feature request? Did you get involved in any design decision? Do you subscribe to whatever list Gnome Shell developers discuss their ideas?
Canonical has and pays UI design experts. I don't know if they're the best, but I remember going to a conference given by one of them a few years ago at the FOSDEM.
"The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis."
Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers.
So it appears to be just a fact that people are developing this in their spare time. That doesn't mean they're less competent than paid developers; of course not. It simply means that compared to a big company, like MS or Apple, they just don't have the same level of cash money resources to hire the right kinds of people--UI design experts--and buy the right kinds of feedback--real-life user testing, focus groups--that big companies do. And that very much shows in these screenshots.
Alpha or not, criticism is essential for furthering the project. If everyone just sat around and said "whew, lots of hard work, good job guys!" to whatever crap any OSS dev produced, OSS would never progress. I want Gnome 3 to be better because I use Gnome every day!