In my experience most communities like this are quite unreceptive to feedback – both in hoops you have to jump through to give it, and in terms of attitude from maintainers. I haven't engaged with the Thunderbird feedback process so this may be unfair to them, but it's a broad perception I have and so I think organisations that do want the feedback or do want first-time contributors need to push hard to make that happen.
So, image you're the new hire and you are welcomed to this massive code base with thousands of files, each thousands of lines long, without some clear separation of concerns or "basic modern best practices".
And the first thing you do, is tell everyone how shit their code looks. The same code that pays for yours and everyone else's paychecks.
I've no idea why you're asking me this, nor what point you're trying to make with your story. Can you make it plainly please, so I can understand what point you're trying to make?
I have engaged with it. They definitely aren't receptive and development moves excruciatingly slowly, but I wouldn't attribute that to being negative so much as strictly limited resources.
Thunderbird is what it is; if you find it useful in its current incarnation use it (I do), but don't expect it to noticeably improve at the rate we've come to anticipate from other open-source projects. Even though Thunderbird is very popular by common open-source metrics for whatever reason it just doesn't move very quickly.
Which is an advantage, not a problem. I do not change my user behaviour regarding email often (if at all), so I really have no need or desire to see the tool I use for email changing (at all).
Every change brings with it a cost that the user must pay.
Strongly disagree. Multi-line rows in particular have been missing from Thunderbird (and ONLY Thunderbird) for 20 years.
That is not an exaggeration, Outlook had them 20 years ago. People expected this feature, 20 years ago. I myself posted in the bugzilla issue 20 years ago.
I mean, I get that. It has to be the very rare open source project where the major bottleneck is insufficient opinions, especially of the very common "strident and underinformed" variety.
I had MITMed my robot vacuum and discovered that it, like a disaffected teen, hung out in a chat room all day. I created a little python library to send it some XMPP messages so I could work around the app's terrible scheduling and put some commands in a cron file. And then I open sourced the code, because why not share?
It was a happy day for me when that robot died. Then I had a legitimate reason for archiving the project and never dealing with a user request/opinion.
