[lupusreal]

I think it's just a standard corporate insularness. Devs being paid to work on the software by the corporation view outsiders as a nuisance and certainly don't like outsiders giving them more work to do. They'd rather find justifications to remove features reinvent old systems to "reduce legacy cruft" (make their jobs easier.). Basically, it all makes sense if you assume standard commercial developer motivations.

[yxhuvud]

Or even better - remove features and then let someone else implement them.

[traverseda]

Or remove features and don't let someone else implement them because you don't want to add in any configuration options.

[tmtvl]

Fornunately with Free software that doesn't matter too much because anyone can add a feature and if you don't want to accept it people can go to the other person's implementation instead.

I mean, isn't that how Cinnamon and Panteon and Unity and Cosmic and MATE were born?