If your product is great, it doesn't need to be good (2010)
This is a problem with almost all open source software: for all the talk of doing one thing and doing it well, they almost all end up being kitchen sinks in the end. The only major success story I can think of was when Mozilla was forked and trimmed down to Firefox. Hopefully the same thing will happen to Firefox, and we can get a browsing experience where the focus is the average user experience, with easy ways to change it into an expert user interface. And even more hopefully something similar happens to every desktop manager, email client and shell tool out there. Make things extensible, then remove the cruft. Continue until the core functionality is all that remains.