What you're describing as "gatekeeping" is actually Product Ownership and should be applauded, because the alternative is a product owner who abdicates responsibility to the customer.

Lots of responses to a comment I explicitly did not make. Let me try and spell it out for you folks:

demand was suppressed by an access bottleneck, the bottleneck is gone, expect a magnitude of change proportional to how much demand was actually pent up rather than proportional to how much programmers currently think was reasonable to deny.

Explicit things I am not saying: gatekeeping was bad, feature creep is good or desirable, etc. etc. etc.

This describes a product with no vision or purpose.

People have to take 'no' for an answer sometimes, even if they don't accept it. You can't really 'gatekeep' your own product.

Can you explain to all of us how this gatekeeping is actually bad? Software would be way, way worse if we just allowed any arbitrary feature to be added to software, and ordinary people who want all the things would have to learn, the hard way, that doing all the things is not actually good.

And the software without gatekeepers will be regarded as confusing and complicated or buggy.

The work to go from software to usable software system is vast.

Knock yourself out and change the world, absolutely nobody is stopping you. That you haven’t already does tell us something though.

> Prediction: programming is going to change massively not only because the cost of creating code will go down, but because people are so tired of this sort of gatekeeping "we know better" from programmers.

I assume the "gatekeeping" decision to not implement a feature request is coming from someone responsible for the product, not from a developer.