alt Hacker News> Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.
How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".
Any open source project that becomes any size 'uses' money, maybe not directly, but at least from corporate handouts like free hosting.
And once a project starts getting a fair number of contributers political problems arise, feelings get hurt, and forks happen. Quite often the forks take the contributers leaving the original project a shell and a warning to others.