a. Some discussions become the target of trolling and it's necessary to lock threads, unfortunately it happens sometimes. If somebody has made a rude comment then you may want to report that as a code of conduct violation. The developers are volunteers and don't have infinite time to handle all the work that's thrown at them. The disagreement with Pop!_OS was disappointing but I don't know who else you can blame for that, if Pop!_OS wants to go their own way then that is completely their decision. They aren't forced to contribute upstream and I'd say that's good for them and their goals.
b. There isn't really any funding to pay to fix those issues. They're being fixed by volunteers, so progress is slow.
c. I have no idea what this means, extensions are still there.
d. There are issues with Flatpak but all the other options are worse and are more unstable. Before Flatpak, there was just no way for upstream developers to make an "official" packaging for apps. The theming interfaces haven't really changed because those didn't really exist, those were a hack for the entirety of GNOME 3. Having one person implement a design and then gather feedback on it from the community is how open source works. If the community wants it then they'll use it, if they don't then they'll use something else. I'm confused how else you'd expect it to go. Talk is cheap, putting working prototypes in front of the community and then gathering feedback from there is what gets things done.
I also don't really understand why you're saying this makes them the bad guys or comes at the expense of the rest of the community. Like, none of this affects KDE. KDE has their own middleware libraries and makes their own changes. They don't depend on any GNOME libraries. Even XFCE that depends on some libraries like GTK doesn't really have to deal with any of this. GNOME's issues with extensions don't affect them at all because they don't use the GNOME shell, they can package their apps with whatever they want and they don't have to use Flatpak, they probably won't use libadwaita or if they do they'll heavily modify it, etc.
b. There isn't really any funding to pay to fix those issues. They're being fixed by volunteers, so progress is slow.
c. I have no idea what this means, extensions are still there.
d. There are issues with Flatpak but all the other options are worse and are more unstable. Before Flatpak, there was just no way for upstream developers to make an "official" packaging for apps. The theming interfaces haven't really changed because those didn't really exist, those were a hack for the entirety of GNOME 3. Having one person implement a design and then gather feedback on it from the community is how open source works. If the community wants it then they'll use it, if they don't then they'll use something else. I'm confused how else you'd expect it to go. Talk is cheap, putting working prototypes in front of the community and then gathering feedback from there is what gets things done.
I also don't really understand why you're saying this makes them the bad guys or comes at the expense of the rest of the community. Like, none of this affects KDE. KDE has their own middleware libraries and makes their own changes. They don't depend on any GNOME libraries. Even XFCE that depends on some libraries like GTK doesn't really have to deal with any of this. GNOME's issues with extensions don't affect them at all because they don't use the GNOME shell, they can package their apps with whatever they want and they don't have to use Flatpak, they probably won't use libadwaita or if they do they'll heavily modify it, etc.