On the GNOME Project and “My Way or the Highway”
This mindset stems from wanting to fulfill a vision or goal, while complying with a philosophy. If a person proposes an idea that is incompatible with the philosophy of a project, then that project will simply reject it.
The GNOME Project has a vision that it wants to push and perfect. Their philosophy, simply put, is “stay out of my way”. The goal is for the user to be able to do their job without being distracted, and to be encouraged to keep everything organized. To achieve this, they put everything away until the user needs something.
GNOME is designed to avoid overwhelming the user with information overload as much as possible, which is a really important topic for usability for the average computer user. Therefore, it does not follow the traditional desktop paradigm, where there is a taskbar, desktop icons, and others - everything is put away until the user needs them. Likewise, applications also implement hamburger menus to put everything away.
This means, if one proposes the GNOME Project to implement a taskbar with an application menu, a menu bar, or any addition or change that encourages GNOME to resemble something that it isn’t supposed to be, then the GNOME Project will reject it. However, if one proposes something that improves and builds upon the GNOME Project philosophy, then it will be taken into consideration.
This type of behavior is consistent with numerous projects, including Firefox, the Linux kernel, KDE and many, many others. Even much smaller projects, like Sway, have a vision that they’d want to perfect. These projects have a scope in which they’d accept proposals and contributions. They have rules and standards that people must adhere to contribute to that project.