I cannot downvote you because I don't have that power yet.

I guess my defensiveness stems from me being in a similar field as a FOSS developer. I have seen far too many times that people prefer to "bitch" about an issue instead of even notifying me about it. In fact, people love to "bitch" about issues that aren't even there (as an example, the classic "Firefox is slow" is almost always a matter of somebody who has used and upgraded for a long time, resulting in an application with too much baggage - of course a freshly installed application will outperform 6 years of history, cookies, passwords, extensions etc.).

I really wasn't talking about "the flaw in some product", because whether it's a flaw is subjective and also whether it's a product is subjective. They are trying to force a discussion that goes against the very nature of the subject. That is the reason why the discussion is not appreciated - they cannot have the discussion they want and so they ignore mine.

As for "don't need to act surprised" - sorry, that's really what is happening here. I see a lot of people who are bending over backwards making the case that line numbers should have been there for 7 years ("now! finally they get to it! how crazy to take so long!") and share the cognitive disconnect that they apparently have a desire to moan about the FOSS process being broken while actually being witness to a situation where it worked.

Cue them moaning about whether or not "OSS projects [are] immune to criticism merely because you can fix them, given enough time?". No, they are not. This is an example where it worked. Don't act surprised.

See why this is an unproductive discussion, and both sides just vote? (With your side happening to be less numerous in this thread, pure accident, doesn't mean anything.)

I don't think the original commenter is trying to accomplish anything. It's such a minor issue. Passing judgment isn't about wanting to effect change at all. Judgment is about deciding between say firefox and chrome. (Now this is a minor dimension, so hopefully nobody's using it as a basis for the decision.)

Let me turn the question around. If you want to accomplish something why would you use confrontational language? I'm certain you too realize that and aren't trying to convince anyone of anything. You just need to vent. So, if both sides are like this, what's the point of discussion?

The only thing to do with judgment is to take it in the chin (maybe correcting gross factual inaccuracies) and move on. Anything else sheds more heat than light. If that seems unfair, remember that I have no users in my open source projects, and would kill for someone to try it long enough to judge it. (links in profile)

Yeah, I'm afraid you are right - being a FOSS guy talking to people who want their "product to just work!" is a very tiring thing. They want to pass judgment while I want to discuss the process of their judgment. I don't do it often, but this thread was just too tempting, what with it having an example of the process working as it's main subject. Of course, people still get it wrong and then insist on being right. Very hard to deal with in general.

As for your project - phew, that is miles over my head, sorry. Trust me, though, traction can also be a curse. At a certain level, you start to get people who don't criticize your software or code, they criticize you for their own inability to use it.