Opera is not a Nokia product, so they probably have little influence on its development.

There are 2 issues with Opera:

1. Opera wants more correctly coded web pages. While Firefox and IE are more tolerant to bad website design. Actually this is a good thing, as many websites are designed so badly because they still render under IE or Firefox.

2. Opera's javascript implementation needs to be improved, this is the main issue with opera.

Opera has been chosen as it is very flexible for small screens and it renders most sites better than minimo/firefox. There is always a compromise being made, and Safari is not on sale up to now ;-)