Too little, too late (specially too little)
This is just another account of how amazingly full of shit the GNOME team (Red Hat, let's just call it with it real name) continues to be. On one hand they continue NACKing the problems with their environment people have been shouting into their ears from the last two years -at least-; while now on the other they tacitally ACK them but in the same vein they do everything: arrogantly, reluctantly, thinking only about control.
As clearly showed in this eye-opening essay (and the numerous links and comments that spawned in many levels deep), the GNOME team themselves have made clear both extensions and themes are detrimental to their goal of tight CONTROL over every aspect of your involvement with GNOME, whether you are a mere user, a theme or extension dev, a third app dev, or a distro dev.
So much for the argument that "Gnome shell sucks less because you can make it so by using extensions". People, they DON'T WANT THAT. They themselves say it loudly and clearly and without a trace of regret. They *won't* change what you expect them to change. Just read carefully the linked post above. They broke the extensions and themes on each release intentionally. Now they "tackle" this issue...
At this point what they are asking themselves is this:
"how do we attempt to save our project while NOT having to ackowledge the criticism, and NOT having to drop an inch of control??".
Answer: We take control of the extensions, and not third parties.
For them it is a good solution, they tackle many angles at once: tighten control, avoid change, pretend change, do something about public oppinion.
In the end the outcome will be decided by the sum of the personal choice each of us has to make between "do I stop, do I stand back against people that are against what this OS was always about, do I turn my back on them and take some weight on me" or "I need the short term gain of not distracting myself with ackowledging there is a problem here and reacting to it: that myself, as a user, as a contributor to this scene am not in these people plans". Do you keep pluging your ears and go "lalalalalala everything is awesome" like these people want you to do?.
You may call me delusional, I won't give a shit. I think many of the people that have been here from the beginning in the nineties, haven't (or haven't completely yet) forgot the struggles and years of effort on part of each member in this community to get to where we got a few years ago. The issue here is *money*. The issue here is *companies wanting to subvert Linux ecosystems for money*. Just take a look at what company employees the key GNOME devs are, for christ sake. To the younger, uninformed people: educate yourselves, don't take for granted what you have now, and yes, *fight* to conserve your power over it. If you are "just" a user, your power resides in your CHOICE, and in your OPPINION. If you are a dev, you also have the power of FORK, the power of NOT PLAYING THE GAME.
Oh and hi to all. This is my first post (registered to say this).