I think they always have done at a certain level, but of course good developers do not make good "joe average" users, and the open source movement has really always been about programmers, not graphic designers/UX/IA people. That's always where companies have added the real value when they build off open source imo. While I admire what people like KDE and Gnome do in terms of effort, the results they return have always been questionable.
When 90% of your end users are old people who rarely use a computer you have to ask them about there needs. You will collect the 'votes' and may discover you have to drop some functionalities. And maybe a slider UI will be better than a number ticker/spinner control.
I watch them make bad decisions all the time; they want to put a box of 60 categories here in the left nav of the page; they want to have a drop-down menu for every department in the hospital. "Asking" ten users how a user-interface should work, and you'll get ten incompatible and stupid answers.
The trick to using users to get good UI is to have a programmer watch them try a prototype (or using paper prototypes). Of course, the programmer has to be tied to a chair and have his mouth duct-tape'd closed so he doesn't try and help, but the fact is when he sees the "inputs", he'll optimize the layout correctly to suit them. Programmers make fine user-interface designers when they're properly motivated.
You shouldn't ask users how the UI should be. You have to listen to there needs.
Then you have to translate this 'democratic' information into a UI design.
When a user wants a drop-down for every department in the hospital you could translate this into "I want to select a department as easy and quickly as possible".
I don't normally comment on grammar, but you've made this mistake in both of your posts: "there needs" should be "their needs". "There" indicates a place, "their" is a possessive pronoun. It's common to also confuse those two homophones with "they're", a contraction of "they" and "are". Getting those straight makes one's writing more intelligible (and more native-sounding if it's being written by a non-native user of English).
Otherwise, I agree with what you're saying about letting users "design" the UI without actually asking them to design a UI.
I think you should take it one step further and along with listen to their needs, put them in front of a computer, and WATCH what they're doing. Find out what their quirks are, how they expect the software to work and build on that.
Ignorance is not stupidity. I agree that asking users to make UI decisions isn't the best approach, but calling users dumb because they can't use your software is dumb.
