Courage to be different is an open door to creativity.

Yes, it means going in a wrong direction sometimes as well: that's why it takes courage — success ain't guaranteed and you might be mocked or ridiculed when you fail.

Still, Ubuntu got from zero to most-used Linux distribution on desktops and servers with much smaller investment than the incumbents who are sometimes only following (like Red Hat).

So perhaps they also did a few things right?

(This discussion is rooted in one of those decisions too: Ubuntu was the first to standardize on sudo and no root account on the desktop, at least of mainstream distributions)

> You'd think by now they'd have learned, but apparently not.

No. Suffering is the crucial part of virtue signaling, so bugs in slop rewrites are a feature, not a bug.