[majewsky]

> The UI should be the easy bit.

That's your problem right there. Many (most?) FOSS contributors are in it for the intellectual challenge. Designing a good UI is perceived as a lesser problem compared to technical challenges, and therefore disregarded.

Also, design is not the comfort zone of most FOSS contributors (which is why some FOSS projects do dedicated outreach programs not only to women or minorities, but also to designers).

Also, I think there is still some "it was hard to write, so it should be hard to use" mentality. I frequently see it justified it as an avoidance tactic for developer burnout: By making it hard to use your software (e.g. by providing no documentation, or by coating the documentation with a thick layer of jargon), the only users you'll get are the ones persistent enough to work through that on their own, and those will be the ones that deliver high-quality bug reports and contributions.

[keypress]

But there are many rewards to wrapping these products up. MS did well with their little tabbed UIs and checkboxes. It felt more like a mixing desk, easier than say discovering and typing command line options.

I don't think people have a 'this should be hard to use mentality'. I've been with programmers and designers who have had not one idea about designing the interface. They are fine cloning, but not at innovating. And frequently the UI is just born out of cluelessness. Or with websites, the design constraints sometimes override the ergonomics, or even kill code orthognalness.

[forgottenpass]

These are common explanations to read online, but when you Occam's razor them to another explanation (which I'll share in a second) they build unnecessary narrative around motivation.

What if lots of open source GUIs are bad for the same reason many commercial and enterprise-internal GUIs are bad: the core of the problem was solved and the team lacked sufficient incentive to keep working on quality of life enhancements.