Agreed, absolutely. You don't get a good design from just adding in a list of features that people care about until you reach something sufficiently complex. You get it in good part from having someone with technical knowledge standing there and telling people, Sorry, that feature would wreck the logical coherency that we are aiming for. It doesn't go in.

An example that comes to mind of this process in action is the following "discussion" on a feature-request in Linux. (That one picked because in one place it manages to an undue fraction of phases/issues that come up all of the time in real life. It also sticks out in my mind because I learned something useful about the philosophy of Unix from it.)

In reply to Re: Re: Re: So, Netscape is dead? by tilly
in thread So, Netscape is dead? by chunlou

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