>> I'm sure the coders would tell you to s/capriciously/carefully and after extensive study/, no matter how you feel about the changes. I remember the massive storms of protest with default spatial Nautilus, for example, where the UI people told us that spatial was better and we were all wrong to want browser-style, and they had the studies to back it up. <<
Yet they had to finally revert the spatial mode, so what's the value of those studies?
>> A new major version of a big project is going to have some big changes in it <<
Not necessarily in the UI.. And users would be perfectly happy with only minor versions, it's developers who get bored not users!