The primary user of your implementation is the next developer to maintain it.

The user of a piece of software is more important than its current or future maintainers.

Yes but current or future users want reliability, features, and speed. If you care about your users in the long term you should care about the project's maintainers.

I suggested a relative ordering of importance; nowhere did I imply that one was important and the other was not.

Thinking like this is why we have so much crappy software out there.

To quote Ryan Dahl: The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user.

How many more times must it be said? How many more times must Apple win -- and win big -- before open source nerds get the message?