Please don’t theme our apps

I think you missed the last paragraph of that comment which also mentions GTK apps applying their own themes, which is still an option. If you know a developer who wants to do this then let me know and I can walk them through the process.

I don't understand why you would start reactively uninstalling apps or control would be taken away, I don't believe any of them have gone closed source. If the app is open source then no control can be taken away from you, you can just grab the source and inject your CSS. Again would be happy to walk you through this process, but that would be in the worst case scenario, right now and for the foreseeable future it's unnecessary as you can still use the method I previously described with setting your user theme.

It also doesn't really make sense to me to uninstall some app because of some theoretical bad thing that could happen in the future, if you take that view then you would have to uninstall everything it seems, because there is always a possibility that developers make some decision you don't like 10 years from now when the computing landscape has changed. You can of course stay on an old version if there are some changes you don't like, the developers might grumble more and tell you to upgrade for usability and security reasons, but that's a decision you make according to your own risk factors.

>Flatpak

Huh? Flatpak is an API and CLI, it doesn't use GTK. The ways it's usually accessed through a GUI are GNOME Software and KDE Discover, but you don't have to use those.

>I don't trust GNOME/GTK developers to keep their "every preference has a cost" philosophy limited to GNOME

That isn't a philosophy, it's just how development works. Preferences do have a cost, in any project. The actual GNOME philosophy is more along the lines of "GNOME would rather spend the cost of preferences elsewhere" which has been part of the project's philosophy for many years, if you disagree with that decision then feel free to use some other platform.

I don't see what your issue is with GNOME Screenshot, you don't have to use it. Just use Spectacle, nobody is going to take issue with you doing that. The builtin GNOME tools are designed to be simple and straightforward, not to include every feature under the sun. Which features an app has is entirely up to its developer, you can say they should or shouldn't do something but it's not your decision to make unless you are developing that app. The developer might listen to community suggestions but they don't have to, and they are very unlikely to if the suggestions are rude.

>I also stand by my statement of "GNOME not really being a community project" after reading the blog posts by Tobias. There is little room for disagreement besides what the "GNOME way" says and little care for downstream.

This paragraph doesn't make sense to me. The "GNOME way" is just what a group of loosely connected developers all agree on and those blog posts are just one developer's opinion. You're saying it's not a community project but that "GNOME way" is entirely the product of that community, there is nothing else there. Downstream is only relevant as far as they contribute back upstream, because there is no other possible way for there to be any relationship there.

But I would say in a lot of cases with FOSS communities, the well has been poisoned and interactions become toxic very fast, I just try to cut that behavior off at the head and correct any misinformation that is out there.