Seems I haven’t set my blog to autopost things in this category so I just post it here manually, though I can’t post it to Blogs category. Anyway here you go.
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Nice post!
I think one reply in Reddit might make some sense - that it’s better done as a series of increamental changes over several releases, maybe only the background color change as the first.
It also occurs to me that while the development of KDE, as for other FOSS projects, is very much in the open. But users are mostly unware of what’s being worked on (e.g. a “what’s going on” in addition to “what’s merged” in Nate’s wekly blog). But maybe this is a bad idea.
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Beyond the technical and process assessments that you shared… thank you for sharing the human aspect.
I feel that sometimes, across many topics, there’s a tendency to hear mostly from folks at the extremes of feelings - e.g. “this is all amazing!” or “I hate all of this, I’m done!” - and to miss out on hearing about how people try to navigate the reality of ups and downs in a healthy way.
So it does hurt when something that has become such an extension of my own creativity and passion gets disliked… Even when I haven’t directly worked on it!
This really hit home with me - I think it speaks to a real sense of belonging to a community, and to a very appropriate sense of pride in the accomplishments of that community 
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Thanks for improving your first work, the image in the new MR is much better than before ! Feedback was useful after all. I also think that it’s difficult to give useful feedback about visual design because it gives immediately a strong emotion but then it’s not easy to understand what exactly give it a good or bad feeling.
A proposition would be to have a poll with users in order to validate a mockup before developing it.
Polls can definitely have their uses…in my experience, though, getting a representative sample of the users is extremely time and labor-intensive, and doesn’t avoid the possibility of a loud group of very particular users creating the perception that something is widely disliked (and my experience is even with proprietary software that had a much smaller user base than KDE Plasma!). Without that representative sample, I think there’s a risk of designing only things that those selected by the polling methodology prefer, and creating fewer novel things.
One other thought about the blog topic - just my opinion, I think that referring to visual design changes that don’t impact the actual functionality of an application as “broken” or a “regression” kind of dilutes the meaning of those words, and tends to push the tone of the conversation more negatively because in such a case, those words don’t communicate anything other than “I don’t like this.”
I understand what folks mean by it, and I know that’s used by a lot of folks nowadays, but I personally think there’s an important difference between the features and workflow that are available in an application, and the look and feel of that application.
Edit: I was just listening to the Linux User Space podcast this morning, and although on a different topic (a GNOME extension), Dan articulates my thoughts much better
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