My favorite IM client, recently renamed to Pidgin, also recently released a new beta version that diverges significantly from previous behavior and appearance. I get the impression, looking at their site, that this is to be treated as a near-release candidate.
One of the devs points out in his blog that there’s a current hot issue over how the client provides information about which IM service you’re currently chatting over, or which service you would use if you were to message someone in your buddy list. After reading the discussion in the bug report and the comments on his blog post, I can only conclude that the Pidgin developers are only coding for themselves. They are presenting the stereotypical, snide, elitist attitude that many critics attribute to open source developers.
They have made it clear that no matter what anyone says, the logical “use cases” don’t justify reinstating a recently disappeared feature – one which I and other users took for granted as a part of how the app behaves, and have found very useful. To my way of thinking, if you create an app that users love and then hack pieces away without regard for user feedback, you’re shooting yourself in the foot (stabbing yourself in the eye, what have you.) You won’t be trusted as a good steward of open source going forward, and people will begin to abandon use of your product as soon as they can find a reasonably usable alternative. This is bad for everyone involved.
Listen to your users, and stop pretending you live in a perfect vacuum.