Comment by shadowgovt

Good user-facing software tends to have a coherent vision, and that involves getting features cut that people put a lot of time and effort into; even though those features have value, it's possible they don't have value in the product under development.

I don't really have enough context to say whether that was the case here. Mostly I'm raising the comment to note that this is an issue in commercial software too, but the sting is immediately moderated by "At least you got paid." It's a lot easier to see one's work fail to be reflected in the finished product when you can dry your tears with the bills in your money-pile (and I don't know how open source competes in things as cut-throat and taste-opinionated as UI when that continues to be true without solving the problem by injecting money into the process, which carries its own risks).