You should feel guilty! You sounded extremely entitled there. How do you feel when someone asks you -- goads you really, into working for "exposure" instead of your usual rates? It's
more than a little insulting!
If you want Free Software to be different, change it. If you don't know how now, like with anything else, you can learn how, or you can pay someone who has already spent the time to learn. The gimp project has a page where you can easily reach out to developers working on Gimp and fund them directly. If you think this feature is important, you should reach out and find out how you can help make it happen.
Now I don't work on gimp, but I do make Free Software, and I think most of us who program Free Software aren't working for "exposure". We aren't excited to be "used" by "users", and so of course we do not do anything "user driven". We do stuff because we want to, and when we don't want to, we may want-to for money. Like everybody else.