"Now it's been closed and Ubuntu's wandered off into convergence land, and signing up to spend your free time on producing something to help someone sell phones is much less compelling than doing it to produce a product you can give to your friends."
I don't think this is fair judgment. In the "old days" you had PC or Mac and you could call it "smart device". Because average consumer (yes your friends included) used it you could give them one of the GNU/Linux based distribution to install and use it on his/her hardware.
What are your friends using today? Smart phones and maybe smart tablet and smart PC or Mac for sure. In a year or two they will probably be using smart TV won't they...
Why wouldn't you be appealed to give your friends alternative to default OS something in the range of GNU/Linux? A GNU/Linux distribution tailored for their hardware and up to your liking.
There might be valid concerns/issues you might have concerning Ubuntu but having the possibility to offer your friends a way to install GNU/Linux based distribution on their smart phones/tablets is certainly not one of them!
And isn't that the reason GnomeShell ended up the way it ended up? Mobile devices? Convergence? First priority project should probably be making GnomeShell more usable on the desktop and on mobile because currently it lacks both! Unity does slightly better job here probably because as you said there is a common goal and they are working exclusively on it to achieve this but when it comes to GnomeShell every critic is dismissed as not founded but the truth is currently GnomeShell is not fitted to be run on desktops/mobile devices and fixing this should be priority. Bluetooth stack can wait a bit longer it newer managed to be "rock solid" in the first place and we are used to it and accepted it but when somebody start trolling with the whole shell well then don't expect to become direct replacement for Ubuntu just because some folk don't like how Canonical is acting lately to do their thing!
Thoughts
I don't think this is fair judgment. In the "old days" you had PC or Mac and you could call it "smart device". Because average consumer (yes your friends included) used it you could give them one of the GNU/Linux based distribution to install and use it on his/her hardware.
What are your friends using today? Smart phones and maybe smart tablet and smart PC or Mac for sure. In a year or two they will probably be using smart TV won't they...
Why wouldn't you be appealed to give your friends alternative to default OS something in the range of GNU/Linux? A GNU/Linux distribution tailored for their hardware and up to your liking.
There might be valid concerns/issues you might have concerning Ubuntu but having the possibility to offer your friends a way to install GNU/Linux based distribution on their smart phones/tablets is certainly not one of them!
And isn't that the reason GnomeShell ended up the way it ended up? Mobile devices? Convergence? First priority project should probably be making GnomeShell more usable on the desktop and on mobile because currently it lacks both! Unity does slightly better job here probably because as you said there is a common goal and they are working exclusively on it to achieve this but when it comes to GnomeShell every critic is dismissed as not founded but the truth is currently GnomeShell is not fitted to be run on desktops/mobile devices and fixing this should be priority. Bluetooth stack can wait a bit longer it newer managed to be "rock solid" in the first place and we are used to it and accepted it but when somebody start trolling with the whole shell well then don't expect to become direct replacement for Ubuntu just because some folk don't like how Canonical is acting lately to do their thing!