the other day i tried (and failed) to teach somebody to use freecad (as i wasn't able to find a working torrent of autocad) and a thought dawned on me.
so many foss applications like freecad, gimp, inkscape, rawtherapee, and im sure more have notoriously terrible user interfaces and an overall shit user experience. it's definitely a meme at this point that the main reason people don't use gimp is that its such a fucking nightmare to use, especially if you've already used photoshop before. having to navigate through nested menus or enabling hidden options to do something that is a single button in photoshop can be infuriating, and it highlights a reason why professionals often just ignore these tools entirely.
but, the way i see it, these applications often have fairly decent feature parity from their commercial counterparts - because implementing a feature is, from an engineering perspective, a fun challenge. but, designing a fluent, usable, and arguably pleasing user interface isn't. there's too much human interaction in designing an interface, and especially amongst the hard-core foss crowd, the people don't matter. they've never mattered.
when dropbox was announced it was quickly panned by the foss crowd, mocking how they could set up something just like dropbox with just a ftp server and a ssh connection. from a technical perspective, in terms of just checking the boxes of what functionality dropbox offers, sure - of course you as a computer guy could do it. but they entirely refused to accept the human aspect of dropbox, the experience and ease of use of making those features available to the masses.
far too many foss developers forget that in order to have a world of mass adoption and use of foss software, we cannot simply create a tool that checks the boxes of what we think are required features, but leave figuring out how to actually accomplish anything with these tools up to the user to struggle though.