I don't know if this has been posted before, but Matthew Thomas has posted a seering review of open-source UI designs which hits close to home for us.
http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/04/13
What can we do to avoid the fate of Mozilla's UI? Do we need a UI tsar to avoid disaster? Or, is there a way to make entire UI's be swappable in and out, so that people can make up UI's in a decentralized way and thus let the market work it out?
Here's a bit of flamage copied from the article:
"As in a professional project, in a volunteer project there will be times when the contributors disagree on a design issue. Where contributors are paid to work on something, they have an incentive to carry on even if they disagree with the design. Where volunteers are involved, however, it's much more likely that the project maintainer will agree to add a user preference for the issue in question, in return for the continued efforts of that contributor. The number, obscurity, and triviality of such preferences ends up confusing ordinary users immensely, while everyone is penalized by the resulting bloat and reduced thoroughness of testing."
This sounds exactly like us! Go read the whole thing; it's short and interesting.
-Lex