I think it’s more a result of lack of cohesion and direction. Open source companies with strong purposes and great lead produce good results. Projects that aggregate lot of contributors each with their goals wishlist and wants tend to be more disgregate not because love of complexity or because they look down good ux but because each coder work at the feature they need and cram it somewhere on the existing ux.
Doesn’t help that there are relatively few desiners that are contributing into open source projects compared to devs. It’s rare to find a designer contributing a cohesive ux to a project and when they do it’s hard to find someone that understand every piece of the program to actually swap out the interface.
Project with a good lead can at least mitigate that by gating new contributions and fixes to adhere to some general design, at least improving the app invrementally.
Doesn’t help that there are relatively few desiners that are contributing into open source projects compared to devs. It’s rare to find a designer contributing a cohesive ux to a project and when they do it’s hard to find someone that understand every piece of the program to actually swap out the interface.
Project with a good lead can at least mitigate that by gating new contributions and fixes to adhere to some general design, at least improving the app invrementally.