I've seen many stewards of FOSS projects treat non-blocking but ugly interface bugs as high priority issues, but terrible interfaces, workflows, wording, etc. as documentation problems or back burner issues that stay open forever.
I think it's a "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. Devs understand interface bugs because there's a logical difference between bug-free and buggy code. Design isn't that cut-and-dried. No matter how many times people try to quantify terrible workflow to get some sort of Big O metric— number of clicks/screens, amount of scrolling, et. al. it crumbles in opposition to empirical research. Justifying your design decisions with user research is much more difficult with open source projects, so you've really got to take the word of someone with that domain-specific interface design knowledge.
But it's important not to let these problems languish. People love the familiar— when maintainers and core users imbue their workflows with mitigation strategies, they view fixes with skepticism or even hostility. Once significant functionality gets piled on that flawed base, the chance of ever having a good, usable interface is pretty much nil.
I think it's a "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. Devs understand interface bugs because there's a logical difference between bug-free and buggy code. Design isn't that cut-and-dried. No matter how many times people try to quantify terrible workflow to get some sort of Big O metric— number of clicks/screens, amount of scrolling, et. al. it crumbles in opposition to empirical research. Justifying your design decisions with user research is much more difficult with open source projects, so you've really got to take the word of someone with that domain-specific interface design knowledge.
But it's important not to let these problems languish. People love the familiar— when maintainers and core users imbue their workflows with mitigation strategies, they view fixes with skepticism or even hostility. Once significant functionality gets piled on that flawed base, the chance of ever having a good, usable interface is pretty much nil.