@mikewalsh
I wrote a very long article about this on my blog, but let me give you a simplified version.
FOSS has always been about do-ocracy. The more you do stuff, the more you are "valued". Those who do the most stuff, eventually rise up to the top, and become maintainers, elders, stewards, whatever you want to call it - and they get to decide what happens to the projects.
In the past it was mostly "volunteers" who did most of the heavy-lifting.
There no £££ involved, so motivations range from personal itch to personal pride.
This (generally speaking) worked well, because only genuinely interested person would work on FOSS projects, and they cared for that project because of their personal involvements. When they got at the top, they made decisions that (they thought) were best for the projects (they didn't necessarily get it right, not all the time, but its the intention that counts).
And nobody cared, because there was no £££ to be made from FOSS projects.
Until RH and MySQL made it to a billion dollar company club.
For the better or worse, this made companies - either friend or foe - to start looking at FOSS. And they started to put people (=paid employees) to work on FOSS projects.
Unlike the volunteers of old, these employees don't have genuine interest on the projects; they clock their time only because their bosses tell them to. Still, because they're now the "most prolific contributor" by whatever metrics you want to use (number of bugs fixed, number of lines written, etc), they too rise to the top. When they reach the top, however, they don't make decisions which are best for the projects. They make decisions which are best for their bossess (companies), naturally.
And companies rarely want to make FOSS projects better. All they care is how to make more money from them, because all those quids they pay their employees don't fall from the sky, hey?
As simple as that. As for the rest of us, "the peasant caste", as you said so eloquently, is "take it or leave it ..." and might I add, "... as we couldn't care !@#$% of what you think since you're not the paying customer anyway."
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As for the AppImage/wayland stuff, my position doesn't change. Many Qt-based AppImage will run perfectly okay; and that's because they include the entire Qt-libraries in the AppImage. Why couldn't gtk3-based AppImages do the same, eludes me.
However, being the pragmatic and nice people that we are, we try to accommodate. I can argue my position with the LibreWolf developers until we're both red in the face, but the fact still exists that Fatdog users won't be able to use those AppImages until one of us do something.
Hence, since it's not too difficult to do it, I decided to build gtk3 that supplies those missing symbols (in other words, gtk3 that links with libwayland).
It doesn't mean that we support wayland or anything. We supply it just so that these oddball AppImages work.
And this is not the first time we do it either. I have libselinux in the repo. We don't use SELinux in Fatdog (it's an overkill for a desktop OS), but one of the AppImages requires it (looking at you, OpenShot. Yes, you. Tell me, what does a video editing program have to do with Secure Operating System???), so we build it for people who needs it.
It doesn't, however, mean that we will supply all missing libraries from all malformed AppImages. We consider this on case-by-case basis - as being a small team and doing this in our free time, we have other priorities in life. Unlike those paid employees 
