This is probably the most important aspect of all. Everything said here by more or less official Nokians about why an "N900" wouldn't be released sooner (spell: CES) etc. etc. does make sense to a certain degree and I can live with it. Or rather: I could live with it if they'd given us something to spend money on in 2008. That is the reason for my frustration, not the late release date of the Maemo 5 device.

I'm not a developer myself and have no experience with other projects or communities, but there's one thing I always found odd about the Maemo ecosystem:

Community members expect Nokia not only to take the lead, but to actually do things themselves. On the other hand, when it comes to implementing things requested by users, Nokians always point out that this is an open platform and they expect "the community" to handle these things, while Nokia only provides a basic experience.

This is an impression I got from the early days (I bought my 770 in early 2006). Things do change right now. In fact, change started during the first half of 2008. But there's still traces of "But first Nokia has to..." answered by Nokia's "Do it yourself if you want it."

Why do I point this out?

Because it indicates a lack of role allocation. What's new for Nokia ("being open") is new for the community as well. People know how to work in a community that's completely open. People know how to play by the rules in restricted communities (like developing for S60 or jPhone). And of course people know how to work in communities that definitely act against the intentions of the company producing the hardware (hacking game consoles etc.).

What we have is different. We don't fight Nokia and hack a closed device. That would be easy: No help expected, all done by ourselves.
We also don't really work on par with Nokia like we would if this were a normal free software project. And we don't even have clear guidelines like "you do the software if you want, but stay out of the platform, will you?" as in controlled communities.

It's a little bit like a kid being confronted with a teacher or a parent who tries not to act authoritarian but doesn't know how else to handle the responsibility. The teacher/parent will make a lot of blatant mistakes (as did Nokia), but in the end, the child will get confused and will not know what it should do, what his role is.
Of course the community is not a child in terms of being immature, but it's still growing. And the community is confronted with a partner who, at least in the beginning, didn't know how to handle his own role in this partnership. Such a situation always affects both parts in a negative way.

This is my explanation for several weaknesses we still have in the Maemo community even though the project started quite a while ago. Maybe somebody at Nokia had similar thoughts... after all, a lot of the work they did in 2008 focussed on defining roles, even words. And it seems they are about to change some of the rules yet again with Fremantle: There are some statements indicating that maybe we'll have more openness not only in code, but also in the development process.