>recognize that designers serve a crucial purpose that isn’t “dumbing things down” or “making things look nice” and that most developers have no idea how to do it themselves.
That's true, but also remember that not all designers are actually competent, or in agreement with your preferences. I'm definitely no MS fan, but look for instance at Windows 7, or better yet, Windows Vista: IMO, Vista was the peak for the Windows UI (forget about the performance problems it had at the time): it was pretty, but pretty easy to use most of the time too, with a highly discoverable interface. Now look at modern GNOME, which its backers tell us is created by "UI experts". It reminds me of Scientologists calling themselves "mental health experts". Calling yourself an "expert designer" doesn't make you one, and even any professional field, there's frequently wide disagreement. A lot of design is subjective anyway, so you can't just point to one self-appointed "designer's" opinion and use that as gospel. Even back in MS land, somehow the "experts" went from the highly-attractive Vista UI to the butt-ugly flat UI "Metro" UI in Win8, and that's at the very same company!
The problem is that "UI expert" isn't enough of a specifier. Someone who makes an interface aesthetically pleasing is not necessarily someone who is capable of designing according to known HCI laws. There are absolute truths in UI design, and there are things which, when you spot them, are a massive tell that functionality has taken a back seat.
Moving the start menu from the corner, or otherwise wasting corner or edge space, is one of them.
> That's true, but also remember that not all designers are actually competent,
And not all developers are competent developers, and not all bus drivers are competent bus drivers. That doesn't say anything about the profession itself.
> or in agreement with your preferences.
These things aren't art projects. Using research and testing within your core user bases to remove as much 'preference' as possible is a core tenet of interface design. I see lots of developers scoff at that idea, citing a million popular interfaces that they hate. But, look how many UX Researcher (as opposed to UX Designer) positions there are out there, which usually require a data-focused graduate degree: their entire field is devoted to basing design decision in reality rather than going with the whim of the designer.
Having a working mental model of software changes the way people look at interfaces, and the sorts of interfaces most developers like, most non-developers absolutely hate, so unless the core audience is software developers, it's probably not going to cater to their unusual usage style like FOSS often does. You can design for both. It's a lot more difficult, but if that's your audience, your only other option is to be less useful to some of them. As we can see from adoption, very few end-user-facing FOSS applications get any attention from non-technical users for that exact reason.
> Now look at modern GNOME, which its backers tell us is created by "UI experts".
Last I checked, GNOME was being designed mostly by one guy that didn't have any formal interface design training, but even if they did get a bunch of experts for a later version, it's not like they have carte blanche to make changes. I outright refuse to contribute design work to FOSS projects because you spend 80% of your time justifying your existence and defending every tiny contribution from a ton of misguided technical design criticism from people who don't realize they don't know the technical concepts in design. It's like a bunch of copy-and-paste wordpress plugin 'reviewing' an architectural refactoring by an experienced software engineer based on two minutes of a priori thought experiments and some stuff they read in some articles over the years. Good design always comes from feedback, pushback, and iteration, but that doesn't work if most people involved have no idea what they're talking about. If you asked me to revamp the GNOME UI, I'd run away as fast as I could.
That's true, but also remember that not all designers are actually competent, or in agreement with your preferences. I'm definitely no MS fan, but look for instance at Windows 7, or better yet, Windows Vista: IMO, Vista was the peak for the Windows UI (forget about the performance problems it had at the time): it was pretty, but pretty easy to use most of the time too, with a highly discoverable interface. Now look at modern GNOME, which its backers tell us is created by "UI experts". It reminds me of Scientologists calling themselves "mental health experts". Calling yourself an "expert designer" doesn't make you one, and even any professional field, there's frequently wide disagreement. A lot of design is subjective anyway, so you can't just point to one self-appointed "designer's" opinion and use that as gospel. Even back in MS land, somehow the "experts" went from the highly-attractive Vista UI to the butt-ugly flat UI "Metro" UI in Win8, and that's at the very same company!