why are mid sized open source projects worse than the proprietary ones?

[Alice (Midori)]

We all forget it, since we are so used to the way ompt works, but it is terribly designed. For a new user it is dauntingly confusing, and always finds a new way to trip up their creative flow. It is a godaweful mess, and we need to own that, accept it, before we can begin to change it.
There are some real positives, the tab system is a strong intuitive one. But the contents of the tabs get in the way of things, presenting options that a person cant even interract with (greyed out options) to overwhelm the mind giving our present system an information overload.
I know when I first started in mpt (before I knew there was an o version, which i think was only a few years old at the time) I was forced to read the help section almost every time I used it, and these days the help isnt even an offline thing, new users have to go to the wiki.
The reason I eventually came to these forums in the first place was to learn things I was sure I could do in ompt but had no help in the help learning about such as  Zxx macros and how to take full control of vsts. I had to search the forums here just to properly learn what I was doing because I learn very slowly and always have.
The point is, what a programmer thinks is self explanatory almost never actually is. The things us wizened old users of a bit of software think are logical pretty much never are. And to see that difference and fight to bridge that gap is the power of carefully thought out design... which is what is lacking in the majority of open source projects out there, including this one.

While i agree with you on several points (mainly all what you said about Blender), i also don't think that a dedicated team of designers is a must for the GUI to be usable and/or intuitive. It really depends, because there do exist people who are good at both programming and design at the same time. I feel like it's more likely to become problematic when there's a lot of contributors, each with different ideas and no strong leadership in regards to this area of design.

I completely disagree with what you said about OpenMPT, it has always been the simplest to use among all trackers i know, with the most intuitive GUI layout. Especially compared to old DOS trackers without mouse support, with big, obtuse menu buttons thrown around with no logic applied to their placement and context.