I know little of how the developers interact, help or hinder the community in Tizen, Android it varies greatly but most appear to be decent, FFOS I don't know but Mozilla are usually pretty good at communicating even if they don't always cooperate in the other spaces that they're active.

UT and Canonical's approach to it is light years ahead of Jolla. You can see exactly what they're working on at any given time, and what the bugs are (save for stuff that's way upstream), what the devs are thinking, what delays there might be & why, and anyone can jump in and participate, offer fixes or ask questions. It's all done on an open mailing list. You can also test any of the builds (at your own risk), which tend to be spat out every few days (or at least once a week). Excellent example of this was when Jolla's own stskeeps (the guy responsible for libhybris, which UT also employs) took issue with incomplete source (actually just mislabelled parts of source) being released for the Aquaris E4.5 in a blog post and post to the dev list. The developers responded and said they'd look into it immediately. They found the headers were incorrect (rather than Mediatek / bQ removing or obfuscating bits of the source) and released a correctly labelled version of the source within days. Granted you can't see the development process for OEMs' work, though you frequently can test their internal builds which are often pushed to the main repos. They're as transparent as it gets.

Regardless, the possible failures or inadequacies of other developers should not exuse Jolla from their own, which are very apparent.