[cosmic_cheese]

In my view, the primary issue is that the FOSS world has a distinct lack of design-minded engineers, which has been the group that's been responsible for the high quality, well designed botique apps that macOS has become known for. That world is much more skewed towards folks that are near-exclusively "nuts and bolts".

There's nothing wrong or bad about that but it manifests quite clearly in the software that gets produced.

Design-minded engineers are great for UI-focused projects because they're the most capable of striking that balance of form and function, or better yet coming up with designs that serve both. By comparison, non-technical designers and fully technical engineers are both at a disadvantage; the designers can make things nice looking but don't have a grasp on what's practical to implement while the technical engineers struggle to design UIs that are appealing to anybody but other technical people.

It's a bit of a self-reinforcing problem. The FOSS world can't attract design-minded engineers because they have such little presence in that culture.