For what it's worth, there's been a lot of turnover in developers in the last 20 years. I've read some comments on older issue reports, and it made me understand why people think GIMP developers are abrasive (even though that hasn't been my experience with the current developers)

I'll say that I got a lot of encouragement and help when I started working on non-destructive editing - there was definitely no one on the team dismissing it (except for some users, oddly enough)