I think as well that probably the biggest values a smartphone platform can have are their developers. But to keep your developer base it is important that you provide as much consistency as possible.

Unfortunately, we were lacking consistency quite often; e.g., consider the UI: Hildon(GTK) -> Qt -> QML -(?)-> HTML5? Another example is the packaging system when comparing Fremantle and Harmattan to Nemo: deb -> rpm.

While I do see the point in adding new features and improving things, actually QML is really great after one got used to it, consistency is also important. I know these are sometimes contradicting goals and that assuring consistency is probably hard. But this was one big thing that me, as "occasional" developer, has often tripped me.
And while some may claim that "small transitions" may be "easy" it is still additional effort. Effort that costs time that many "occasional" developers, like me, coding in their scarce spare time, simply don't have. I even often do not agree that transitions were so "small" a UI, e.g., may easily grow complex and needs to be thoroughly tested.

Imho the "other big two" are (to some degree) so successful because they have thousands of devs producing hundreds of thousands of apps. And they, again imho, achieved building such a large developer base by providing much more consistency then we did during the past years.




Additionally, keeping consistency could have avoided this hostility at all. Imho, this hostility just arose because two systems (Fremantle and Harmattan) suddenly had to compete for a very scarce "resource", the developers.
I also think that we shouldn't waste our time and efforts with such useless fights. Instead we should try to search for a least common denominator and identify and solve the problems at hand; e.g., trying to bridge the gap between Fremantle, Harmattan, or Nemo such that apps can be very easily developed and deployed for all system. I do know there is being worked on this. I just use this as an example.


PS: sorry again if this is too off-topic.