With open source software, there are people who think “that’s dumb,” there are people who think “I want to see it >fixed” and there are people who think “I can do something about it.” The people at the intersection of all three >power open source.
A lot of people in the open source project Y will not see a problem with X, being X a huge usability problem that stop a lot of people from using Y.
So what you have is a lot of people "I don't see the problem with that" ( realistically, a lot of people that will talk about a lot of things, and not about X ), and maybe some of the people that have problems with X that don't know how to communicate his problem, or don't care enough.
Any open source project work like a club. The club work for the people that is part of the club, and does the things that the people of the club enjoy. If you like chess, you will not join the basket club, and probably the basket club will never run a chess competition. Or the chess club a basket competition.
If anything, the "Problem" with open source, is that any change is incremental, and there's a lot of endogamy.
Also user suggestions are not much better. Users often ask for things that are too hard, or incremental enhancements that will result on bloat on the long term.
So really, what you may need is one person that can see the problems of the newbies, of the devs, of the people with a huge investment on the project, and make long term decisions, and have a lot of influence on the people, while working on the shadows towards that goal.