Yes, they're human, just as Bill Gates and all of his minions
are.
However, when it comes to the Gnome devs, I've never seen the slightest
indication that they even pay attention to what the users want or need,
let alone their complaints. This is one of the many reasons I don't use
Gnome any more.
Well in some senses I'm not surprised - I think there is a bit of siege
mentality, but they even systematically blocked a proposal to do a user
survey recently.
One job of any developer is to stop things being done as quick fixes or
adjustments to fix things for a specific use case to the detriment of the
others. Giving users what they want as opposed to what they need
sometimes leads to very bad results. In a lot of cases the users are
other programmers but the UI people have an enormous number of folks they
interface to very directly.