Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero.
What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
I'm definitely one of those strictly-programming people.
Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!
It's not that hard though to make a drastic improvement over that. Basic CSS isn't complicated. Sure, there's quirky things, but it's still possible. As "over the weekend" type of projects, I have taken websites/apps with UIs that I've thought were interesting and recreated them with HTML/CSS. You learn a lot very quickly, and then your UIs start to suck a lot less. It's still coding as far as writing in and IDE and testing/fixing bugs. You just get to skip the compiling part of it!
Almost no one is being paid to make desktop apps any longer. And the UI/X discipline did not make it to the web for whatever reason. The last gasps became designers and settled on more padding, rounded corners, and hidden scrollbars. Most of which are pretty but counterproductive. Dead discipline except for very large products.
The number of job reqs I've seen posted for a dedicated position in the last ten years could be counted on one hand with several fingers left over. I'm interested in the subject so pay attention.
As mentioned the responsibility tends to have been subsumed by designers, but believe few designers study HCI. Part of the reason interfaces get harder to use every year.
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.