When Simon Peter (the author) actually filed an issue for a GNOME change that he found unhelpful, and gave use-cases and invited people to give use-cases as to why the change needed reverting, the change was reverted: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/437
GNOME prefers that people hop onto their IRC (which is not logged so, unfortunately, people can't easily reference previous progress made) but filing GitLab issues also works. There's the gnome-design IRC for trying to create change to the Human Interface Guidelines. In the Nautilus IRC I suggested trying a GNOME Forum to try and collect design feedback better but they say they've tried this before and there weren't enough people willing to maintain it so the forum died. The problem is that GNOME devs get so much outright abuse for their design decisions that it's too unpleasant for them to engage with the community and, because their devs are nearly all volunteers (bar, like, two Red Hatters (one being the Files lead)), there's no-one paid to engage with the community like there is in, say, snapcraft (who have engaged with criticism very well in my opinion, even if they haven't outright capitulated to demand (which I think is a bad idea anyway since you then end up flip flopping constantly because the outrage is always against the status quo (KDE has this problem (https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2018-June/086117...) also see Ubuntu - outrage against Unity 7 was cited in Shuttleworth's comments on why Unity was scrapped ('In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation.' https://blog.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-...) https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/1760https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...). So criticism against GNOME is never engaged with and the rage continues... Still, if you want to try and get the GNOME team onboard, I highly recommend hopping onto their IRC and constructively arguing with them. Arguing here will not change the situation because they don't read pages like this, at least, that's what they were saying in the Nautilus IRC, they want to get on with the task at hand https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC
Admittedly, people like Carlos (the Files lead) do read the GNOME Reddit, so maybe that's the closest thing to a GNOME forum and you could thus try posting there about your gripes with GNOME :) https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/ In fact, this article has been posted on the Reddit recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/8shfiu/make_it_simpl... I suggest commenting there to try and make more progress :)
'My take-away from all of this is that if most of the user experience takes place in a single view, and it’s only things like user settings and options that need to be accessed in separate screens, then keeping the main UI nice and clean by burying those in a side menu is the way to go.'
That article is saying that A/B testing shows that if you have different content views etc then you should have visible navigation, if it's options then sure, tuck it away in a side menu. I don't think the History menu is a 'view' per se...
GNOME prefers that people hop onto their IRC (which is not logged so, unfortunately, people can't easily reference previous progress made) but filing GitLab issues also works. There's the gnome-design IRC for trying to create change to the Human Interface Guidelines. In the Nautilus IRC I suggested trying a GNOME Forum to try and collect design feedback better but they say they've tried this before and there weren't enough people willing to maintain it so the forum died. The problem is that GNOME devs get so much outright abuse for their design decisions that it's too unpleasant for them to engage with the community and, because their devs are nearly all volunteers (bar, like, two Red Hatters (one being the Files lead)), there's no-one paid to engage with the community like there is in, say, snapcraft (who have engaged with criticism very well in my opinion, even if they haven't outright capitulated to demand (which I think is a bad idea anyway since you then end up flip flopping constantly because the outrage is always against the status quo (KDE has this problem (https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2018-June/086117...) also see Ubuntu - outrage against Unity 7 was cited in Shuttleworth's comments on why Unity was scrapped ('In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation.' https://blog.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-...) https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/1760 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...). So criticism against GNOME is never engaged with and the rage continues... Still, if you want to try and get the GNOME team onboard, I highly recommend hopping onto their IRC and constructively arguing with them. Arguing here will not change the situation because they don't read pages like this, at least, that's what they were saying in the Nautilus IRC, they want to get on with the task at hand https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC
Admittedly, people like Carlos (the Files lead) do read the GNOME Reddit, so maybe that's the closest thing to a GNOME forum and you could thus try posting there about your gripes with GNOME :) https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/ In fact, this article has been posted on the Reddit recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/8shfiu/make_it_simpl... I suggest commenting there to try and make more progress :)