In case you don't know who mpt is, he's actually one of a handful of people out there who is trying to fix these problems. He worked on usability for Mozilla for awhile, and now he works for Canonical. I used to work on the Ubuntu desktop experience team at Canonical, and I can attest (as much as my opinion is worth anything) that mpt was easily the most valuable person there in working towards usability. He's not one of the "make things look pretty" kind of designers, it's definitely one of the "functionally elegant" types. Part of his work is designing new Canonical-led features in Ubuntu, and part of it is proposing better interaction designs for apps that came from the community; some of that work is then coded by developers at Canonical, or by the upstream project maintainers, or random community developers, and sadly some of it is just put off or ignored. But the point is, he's the guy who is working to fix design problems.
I think the point of his post was to try to encourage more thought towards the design process by the open source development community, and maybe to encourage more non-developers to get more involved in the design process. He's only one guy, there's only so much he can re-design on his own. You know, days having limited hours and all. So if he spends a couple hours doing some "community outreach" type blog posts and manages to get even one other person to start working on interaction design then he has accomplished more with those couple hours than if he had used them redesigning a part of some app.
In case you don't know who mpt is, he's actually one of a handful of people out there who is trying to fix these problems. He worked on usability for Mozilla for awhile, and now he works for Canonical. I used to work on the Ubuntu desktop experience team at Canonical, and I can attest (as much as my opinion is worth anything) that mpt was easily the most valuable person there in working towards usability. He's not one of the "make things look pretty" kind of designers, it's definitely one of the "functionally elegant" types. Part of his work is designing new Canonical-led features in Ubuntu, and part of it is proposing better interaction designs for apps that came from the community; some of that work is then coded by developers at Canonical, or by the upstream project maintainers, or random community developers, and sadly some of it is just put off or ignored. But the point is, he's the guy who is working to fix design problems.
I think the point of his post was to try to encourage more thought towards the design process by the open source development community, and maybe to encourage more non-developers to get more involved in the design process. He's only one guy, there's only so much he can re-design on his own. You know, days having limited hours and all. So if he spends a couple hours doing some "community outreach" type blog posts and manages to get even one other person to start working on interaction design then he has accomplished more with those couple hours than if he had used them redesigning a part of some app.