What benefit does “the community” gain from this filter?

That’s a key point, also (and, though I’m not intimately familiar with it, and such hyperbole is not generally my style, I believe it is the point of the oil spill reference): the filter adds CPU cycles (wasted energy – see: oil spill) and overhead to WordPress’ content output processing, but provides no discernible gain.

The entire reason for existence for this filter is to assuage Matt’s desire not to see “WordPress” capitalized incorrectly:

> *******
> *** What do we really actually gain from this function? Seriously?
> *******

The correct capitalization of WordPress all over the web. A small easter
egg that makes the people who care about such things happy. (It also
increases participation on Trac.)

This isn’t conspiratorial. It *is* about incorrect decisions being made. It *is* about the principle of the matter of WordPress respecting end users’ right to capitalize “WordPress” according to their own intent (without having to know how to use functions.php to keep WordPress from editorially modifying their content without permission). It *is* about the utter disdain for and dismissal of the community’s response.

When such matters concern the core development team and the project lead, they are no longer merely “little things”, because they belie a willingness to make similarly wrong decisions – for similarly pedantic reasons – about much larger things.

People, who devote a big chunk of their lives to building a project, like to inject some inside jokes into their work, to keep it fun and rewarding and prevent burnout. And people who aren’t involved in the core/”inner circle” see something ominous or exclusive in those jokes.

This is a pretty natural dynamic, and as long as its dealt with sensitively, it can be a healthy tension. For myself, all the little easter eggs make WordPress more attractive… it shows that people were having fun when they coded this stuff. The alternative is a boring, stagnant corporate structure, which might be slightly better at including people in the process, but loses in spontaneity and creativity more than it gains in inclusiveness. So I’m pretty much OK with how the debate panned out.

“The point he made was that if it doesn’t affect your bottom line (income) stop complaining about it. All you do is waste your breath, waste your time, and don’t make as much money as you could.”

Yes, because “making money” is the only thing that matters in the world, right? Bah!

“Shut up, we are the smart ones here” is your answer to concerns of WP users and developers (some of which I personally listen to and learn from most) ?

You tell people that their thought and opinions not worth breath and that is supposed to improve community. Yeah, sure…