@curoli got very close to describing how I view this issue:
The problem is that the powers that be will unilaterally make decisions on those things they deeply care about while pretending not to.
I have no expectation that Linus will give any input I have on the Linux kernel any attention. That doesn’t bother me, because there’s never been any indication that would be the case. On this matter, however, we’ve repeatedly been told there would be a public discussion and opportunity to provide feedback, and that simply hasn’t materialized, and that’s a big problem.
The biggest part of the problem is the disconnect between, “we take the feedback from the community into account,” and the perception that what’s actually happening is, “we take the feedback we like from the community into account.” This means that, however much the powers that be seem to be willing to take community input on the stuff they don’t care about, it’s still very much a polite fiction because it’s entirely at their whim, and that’s not how it’s presented.
If the process can be a fiction for a change this disruptive, that means that the process is a fiction for anything less disruptive than this, it’s just more convincing in some cases than others. This case is particularly glaring because the dodges have been rather obvious. I don’t know if this is because the powers that be simply don’t care, or if they’re worried they won’t be able to make their case if they try to actually sell it. My guess is the latter, as the current implementation is full of irregularities, and the situations where it does work tend come up more often in library code than in application code.
The problem is that we’re not being heard, we’re not even being outright ignored. We’re being told, “lets put a pin in this,” and it’s become clear that it won’t be revisited or that if we do manage to make enough of a stink to force this through the published process our feedback won’t go directly into the round file.
If he’d just said outright, “this is how it’s going to be, put up or shut up,” this would be a dead issue. Promising there would be a discussion on the matter, then switching to treating it like there’s consensus after almost a year of silence is uncomfortably close to gaslighting. Particularly galling was the Dotty Language Survey, which treated a single semester of 2nd year CS students as somehow representative of Scala developers as a whole. There are a lot of things that 2nd years CS students think are a good idea that don’t work out in the real world.