Comment by presbyterian
25 days ago
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
I'm definitely one of those strictly-programming people.
Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!
It's not that hard though to make a drastic improvement over that. Basic CSS isn't complicated. Sure, there's quirky things, but it's still possible. As "over the weekend" type of projects, I have taken websites/apps with UIs that I've thought were interesting and recreated them with HTML/CSS. You learn a lot very quickly, and then your UIs start to suck a lot less. It's still coding as far as writing in and IDE and testing/fixing bugs. You just get to skip the compiling part of it!