...and it what time frame was all of it succeeding, in what king of environment/market? How many mobile phones or comparable products Linus launched? Time is not an infinite resource when creating complex commercial product.

Yes. However, some of the api-restrictions were there because of unstable Qt-version they had to use, which IMO was good reason to restrict them. Don't know about current restrictions though. Also, having all of those other things doesn't come free either and having too much of "administrative burden" may have undesirable results. That's why there has to be something in place to begin with and when it's opened, all of the documentation, api's, bug trackers, infrastructure to support public contributions etc etc have to be in place in such way they don't need to be parsed by developers in difficult and painful way (which is the main reason there's so little interest in contributing to ie. Nemo-project). Doing all of those takes resources, which has to be derived from resources and time used in developing the platform itself, which means there are choices to be made how they are prioritized. Usually they are always prioritized "wrong" as there is always the army of people who know better how to do things even without having insider knowledge from company.

Another thing is that there will always be that one major gripe that was there in the Nokia days also - some things have to be kept out of the public for certain periods of time (ie. regarding new products and their features), which has to be solved somehow without making it all a huge mess. So, I don't really believe there are easy solutions for these things until the resources problem (sustainability of the company) is solved somehow. We may hear something tomorrow, let's hope it's good.