The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

This is another fallacy that many FOSS projects operate under: that it is the responsibility of anyone with a suggestion or complaint to file a bug report.

The developer of a piece of FOSS should care enough about it that if he reads a post on a forum somewhere that describes a simple, obvious problem, he should either look into the problem himself or file a bug report himself.

The Random Internet Guy who posted on a forum or mailing list already expressed the problem. He already took the time to explain it. If it's a problem worth fixing, it's a problem the devs should care about enough to take it from there. (If it's unreproducible or obscure, that's different.)

I'm operating under the assumption that developers of FOSS projects which are serious enough to have bug trackers care about their projects and want to make them the best they can be. If this isn't the case with a project, then I wouldn't expect a developer to care about a bug report, either.

This is not to say that users should never be asked to file bug reports. My point is that, especially with large rewrites, if developers really care about quality and meeting users needs, they ought to be actively seeking reports of problems and addressing them proactively, not refusing to act until someone does the right paperwork.