About colleagues vs. customers: I don't think it can be considered a
misunderstanding by the community, it's largely due to what the WMF
really wants.
The WMF, as the article puts it, doesn't [necessarily] want to work
better with the existing community (-> colleagues) by providing what's
felt useful /for them/ to get things done; instead, it largely assumes
that what's disliked or even plainly harmful now is actually good, if it
can attract a new demographic of users which will like it (-> new
customers).
And more: changing the demographic by ignoring the existing one is
sometimes the very aim of changes; community is assumed broken (it
scares people off), consensus even more so (we can't get anything
decided, we need "leaders" – surely not pre-emptive consensus), nobody
is indispensable (we have a big turnover, we only need to improve "_new_
editors retention"). And yes, this sometimes borders social experiments
(eugenetics? :-) ).
I'm not going to prove all this*; it's nasty to "the community", but
there's also a lot of truth in it and all in good faith.
Nemo
(*) I could quote individual WMF developers or officers but that would
be tough and unnecessary: it's the official strategy, just seen from a
different perspective (by stretching it a bit perhaps).