I was on Ubuntu's first design team in 2009 London

This is indeed pretty obvious when you look at Unity era ubuntu screenshots. The typeface and text rendering is unmatched to this day. And to this day nobody pulled off purple-orange like they did.

But I always had the feeling that even at their peak, they were spread too thin to go through with their vision. The DE looks stunning but the rest of the system apps carry too much gnome-isms that would've gone through extra 1-2-3 design passes if they had the means.

Now I use KDE, it's extremely functional, and broadly looks like how I'd design a desktop. But when I select ubuntu as the typeface, a part of me longs for that purple-orange.

I don't agree with everything Ubuntu did in that time period but shooting down the idea of creating yet another competing app, rather than improving one of the existing options, sounds fairly reasonable to me.

I would've shot it down too. Not because of some "Trojan Horse" bs, but because Mono is a huge dependency which doesn't vibe with the rest of the environment. It's not appropriate for a default app in a standard Linux distro. You could just as easily replace "Mono" with something like "Java", and it would've been shot down equally triumphantly. The fact that they didn't understand this when they proposed the idea shows you how little they knew of the Linux ecosystem, and the fact that they're still bringing up so many years later shows that they haven't learnt anything even after all this time.

And given their enthusiasm for DHH and that overrated "distro" of his, I'm inclined to believe @dvdsgl is one of those people... sigh.