Exactly. Ten years ago a lot of people would have told you that you need central control of code and full-time work from paid developers in a central office with careful managerial oversight to build powerful software. And all those people, many of them "experts," were laughably wrong.
I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.
I guess what I'm saying is that something major would have to change for this to happen. The current FOSS processes can't produce good usability on their own. I am not personally aware of any FOSS software that excels at usability, without a central company driving development.
That being said, my knowledge is not exhaustive... maybe there are examples that I am not aware of.
What you're arguing for is management. So you contradict yourself. You do need some careful managerial oversight because managers have to figure out what sorts of people they need to accomplish a task.
I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.