For reference, these are the changes being discussed:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F5022813
1) Significantly larger changes than this are happening all the time (the
OOUI-ification of old forms, for example), without anyone noticing, so it's
pretty clear people are reacting to the announcement here and not the
actual change.
There is nothing wrong with not paying attention to something well outside
your work area, and people should not be excluded from a discussion topic
just because they are new (or casual) to it, but please consider how it
creates an unhealthy community dynamic when people are criticized for
announcing changes which would otherwise go unnoticed. There are already
too many developers who avoid this list because they find it too stressful
or time-consuming. One of the costs of transparency and open coordination
is that discussions can get easily overwhelmed by a bunch of random people
with strong principles but relatively little idea of what's going on
(that's why wikis are so strict about canvassing, for example); it's a good
mental habit to ask "would I have gotten involved in this discussion
eventually even if it wasn't announced in a mailing list?", and if the
answer is no, consider just moving on.
2) There was once a project to create a free encyclopedia, where every
change had to be discussed and agreed on with half a dozen groups of
stakeholders. It was called Nupedia; it produced a hundred articles in
three years, while its offshoot Wikipedia did well over a hundred thousand.
It probably does not take a thousand times longer to discuss an article
with various gatekeepers than it takes to write it. But it's sufficiently
demotivating that people won't even try; instead they find a project where
their contributions are welcome and not buried in red tape. Software
development is not magically exempt from the same coordination costs that
affect article writing. Please be mindful of unintentionally creating an
unwelcoming environment.
It's not fundamentally different with staff members, either. They have more
time, but that time is bought with donor money, which needs to be spent
responsibly. Designers spending their time videoconferencing with every
interested user on whether they plan to change the shade of the new message
bar to a slightly different yellow some time in the next two years is
probably not what most donors have in mind when they support the movement.
3) When you are asking people to do more early planning and announcement
and discussion, you are asking them to do significantly more work. It's not
a free lunch; they need to cancel some tasks they would otherwise have been
able to do, and spend time writing emails and getting translations and
setting up discussions instead. More discussion means less features.
Sometimes that's a reasonable request; sometimes not. Please consider which
one it is, before asking.
This time it falls squarely into "unreasonable", I think. Exactly what
would an early announcement achieve? Delay producing the videos by half a
year just to make sure the brightness of the ToC border is not 5% off? Or
is "discussion" an euphemism for "veto power" and we should keep our
website less accessible to readers with visual impairments so that the
tutorial video colors are accurate?
Documentation decays; it's a sad fact of life. Developers are acutely aware
of that, since they need to produce and maintain a lot of it. No one likes
it, but there is no reasonable way to prevent it. Halting software
development so that documentation can stay up to date is certainly not one.
4) On a more constructive note, there *is* a reasonable way to reduce
template maintenance burden: make LESS available to template editors so
that variables such as "ToC border color" can be shared between MediaWiki
and userland code. I filed T152832 about that.