alt Hacker News> The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain". They are well aware of it from what I've seen of the Dev discussions on Discord. But the vast majority of the devs are volunteers so they can only do so much so fast. There are also some very nice usability improvements as of late that borrow from other programs, like the Solidworks-style navigation settings and the on-screen draggers for pad / pocket / transform type operations. Yes there are tons of preferences and some of the defaults might not be great, but they've added a "Search Preferences" field to help sort through them all. Then there are issues like in the link below where the discussion of how to improve FreeCAD considers comparisons with other pieces of software.
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/19440#issuecomment...
Another point I'll add is their creation of a Design Working Group to help sort through usability issues and generate a consensus for devs to subsequently implement.
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> I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain".
I mean it more in the sense that it's very difficult to truly conceive of what a new user of the app would stumble over or dislike, if you're very used to it yourself.
Often that means small things that would not be that hard to address become invisible, because there's obvious higher priorities. Other times, things are considered small fries that actually are consistently wrong and need a holistic re-think.
One of the best things to do is to actually watch novice users use your software. This was also a big boost to the "Blender moment", when the Blender studio started inviting over artist and just watched them work in the software. This used to be really hard to do, but has now become a bit easier with screencasting and conferencing tools. I bet FreeCAD is also starting to do more of this.
Thanks for adding additional info! I forgot to mention the Design Working Group as another sign. In KDE we also set up a similar "Visual Design Group" years ago that was behind a lot of the improvements.
I would think it would be beneficial to the companies that make 3D printers and CNC machines to help fund some of these efforts... I've found it often takes the input of commercial interests to get general UX improvements into open-source.
ex: really impressed with the direction of Audacity as an example, though I can also understand why a given community would reject such influence from a single org.