And probably other problems. There were lots of design related discussions just before and after the launch of 8.2
Overall, going flat was an improvement, but it was just too flat and had too many issues, lots of hours were wasted fixing things and it’s still not right.
The design team could present their planned improvements as RFCs, listen to comments and then vote internally. We can’t always think of everything, may it be design or code related.
I think we should have a demo which runs master, personally I reported some of these issues after the release because I did not bother to run master on my production server.
I believe this already happened, but maybe not with a lot of attention. I like your idea of the RFC system. But to have this system works there must be a lot of screenshots about the proposal or something like public test instances which shows the situation before and after the changes, so the users can make a right decision. Another advantage of this is that it can be tested on a lot of devices. Maybe the fonts look good on HDPI screens but not on full HD, etc.
I am currently doing demo improvements for ownCloud within the google summer of code framework and this would make master and branch demos easier. Depending on the time I can work on it, this might be sooner than later.
But yeah I am definitely keeping master or in general branch based demos in my head.
Branch demos would be great, but let’s not forget that translating the flat design to a theme also takes some effort, so collaboration is also required earlier using whatever media is used to present the intended changes.
Ideally a process should be defined which can be improved over time when we see that it isn’t delivering the intended value. We just know that what was used in the past was broken, probably because too few people had access to the early documents.