One of the bigger problems with UIs is that there’s a lot of subjectivity and personal tastes involved and people will in general tend to feel more strongly when things don’t look or behave the way they want. This sometimes leads, when the person happens to have the necessary skills and will, to something new being built, often primarily tailored to their author’s own needs. Of course it’s also true in other areas (see HABApp) but from personal experience I found this to be particularly true for frontends. When you’re a hobbyist and not doing this on a payroll there’s also the fact that you may just want to spend your evenings building things as you like without getting involved in work environment-like debates, which perhaps might be what you want an escape from in the first place 
- and that shouldn’t be discouraged either.
When I did HABPanel back in 2016 I ended up providing the tools to empower users to build their own widgets, rather than playing cat and mouse with feature requests, and it was somewhat successful and even was humbled by the ecosystem that was eventually created (see for example New Pride Theme for HabPanel (Based on Matrix Theme) - Optimized for iPhone or Matrix Theme for HABPanel - among others!). This proves there’s a need for these types of tools which allow people to be creative. I hope we can achieve the same with this new main web UI which tries to be as universal as possible, with a good-enough default look but customizable as well. Of course there will be expectations and they will be hopefully addressed as much as possible but the focus should be on providing support to build new designs, rather than minute details and changes to a mandated design.
Perhaps most important, I hope this upcoming major 3.0 release, with this fresh coat of paint, will make a lot of people take another look at openHAB - because a fraction of them will also become contributors and that would get the ecosystem going!