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).