On avoidance of alleged hypocrisy

That's a very good question. I think what's happened here is there is a conflict in the general messaging about the role of community input in Ubuntu development and the distinct lack of messaging about how community participate in the design process in particular.

The design process is discordant with established patterns of gathering feedback in decision making Ubuntu has been using. Canonical has built up expectations on driving community feedback early for a release at at UDS events. Were design roadmaps for Lucid discussed at the last UDS? Was there even a discussion about a usability test plan if Canonical is sincere about wanting quantifiable usability data about design changes?

If you look back at all the discussions at UDS.. things like the discussion over dropping gimp and adding pitivi...that discussion was done in the open before the changes went into effect. The window button ordering was probably about as impactful (and heated) as dropping gimp..but no UDS discussion...no reasoning put forward that makes consistent sense with a set of understood benefits even if its not agreeable to opponents of the change.

The design process leading up to the button change stands outside of the established expectation that plans for impactful changes for a release get discussed at UDS. Finally telling users that the design team is looking for quantitative usability testing data from end-users several hundred comments deep into a bug report about the change is NOT the way you do data driven design.

If Shuttleworth is serious about wanting data and using crowdsourcing mechanisms to construct viable usability test methodologies, as he finally got around to saying in the bug report 20 days after it was filed, then he sure as hell should have communicated at UDS to give everyone a heads up about the role the design team wants the community to take.

-jef