The whole linus thing has got me thinking about Gnome and options. Due to my status as the "Linux desktop expert" at our office, I get a lot of questions about "Why does X do Y?". Of all the things that people come to me to ask about, only one has been about customization. That was to do with the panels (which need work and upstream knows it) on the first day. Every other question has been about an annoying bug, usually to do with integration.

Oh, and most of those bugs come not from Gnome apps but from OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Therefor, I state that, given developer time is finite, I would rather have them fixing integration bugs than adding customization for power users.