GNOME has been plagued with terrible maintainers and even worse management that doesn't get rid of them immediately, leading to a drastic erosion of the brand value it acquired during GNOME 2.
In any sensible project Mr Christian Persch would be stripped of all his commit privileges immediately, but in GNOME there is no such oversight.
The root issue is probably that most GNOME people are employed by Red Hat, but Red Hat doesn't really care about the consumer desktop GNOME is targeted for because they focus on servers and enterprise.
As a result, these guys are paid to work on GNOME and thus have plenty of time to influence it, but are left without any management, which results in these guys directing the project according to their own whims, with total disregard for users.
Over time, this culture eventually influenced even people like Persch which appear to be independent maintainers.
In any sensible project Mr Christian Persch would be stripped of all his commit privileges immediately, but in GNOME there is no such oversight.
The root issue is probably that most GNOME people are employed by Red Hat, but Red Hat doesn't really care about the consumer desktop GNOME is targeted for because they focus on servers and enterprise.
As a result, these guys are paid to work on GNOME and thus have plenty of time to influence it, but are left without any management, which results in these guys directing the project according to their own whims, with total disregard for users.
Over time, this culture eventually influenced even people like Persch which appear to be independent maintainers.