You didn't see that coming? Maemo is not tied to Nokia but you're ofcourse free to make your own community and/or hardware product. Then you will have to make all those difficult design choices, and deal with a vocal community living in nostalgia. Maybe you will fail, maybe succeed, but it will be damn hard pleasing everyone because sacrifices are made and the product is commercial.

Too bad you put the tag of a corporation instead of a product by the corporation. You could have said GNOME or maybe the other sounds like KDE 1 or Windows 95. Or TWM...

But wait, we must give people the choice between ALSA and OSS, ESD, aRTs, Pulse, Jack. We must force them to chose for them, because then they are truelly free... and we must allow them their own libc, and their own compiler... we don't do that, right? We provide them the best libc and best compiler for the job because we make their life easier. In some cases we keep in mind the user wants choice, in other we don't keep this in mind or we make it impossible (MSIE, or DRM, ...)

(The quality is sometimes questionable, and some stuff like PIM is not available, but otherwise you're right and the wide adoption of libpurple is a great example of libraries being reused. Because that is what you can compare to really.)

The tablets were not aimed at specific use cases; or at least their original use cases were abandoned by its users. But now those same users think that will always remain possible with the next Nokia/Maemo product. Impossible. We have people who want to use a capacitive touchscreen with Maemo which requires different applications and UI design choices. We have people who want to use stylus. We have people who do not want 24/7 connectivity. We have people who want big screens for e-books. You simply cannot please everyone! So you vote Red, Blue, or Green.

Application managers are always a mess because there are so many overlappings, some are just better sorted than others, but its always hard to make this informative. Users want to be able to know the clear differences between the choices they're able to make. So that is why we have those community and review sites for products, and thats where word of mouth works well.