What you're trying to say is that open source works best when there's little or no design work involved and little or no product vision required.
Linux is a canonical example: it's simply a clone, design wise, of a plain old UNIX. The product vision was "copy UNIX". Where the wheels fell off Linux is the moment it got ahead of the UNIX legacy (i.e. modern desktops) and started having to compete with Windows, so suddenly the "copy UNIX" goal was no longer relevant. But Windows was made by Microsoft, or "the great satan" as Stallman memory called it.
So simply switching the goal to "copy Windows" wasn't possible because Windows and UNIX were very different and anyway, lots of people hated Windows. Linux had picked up a lot of semi-technical and technical users who didn't care much about FOSS purity but loved the club feeling that using an obscure OS brought them. The end result was big splits and bizarre, illogical design decisions being made simply because "do it like Windows did" was ideologically unthinkable, even when Windows had basically got it right (or at least, less wrong).
Linux is a canonical example: it's simply a clone, design wise, of a plain old UNIX. The product vision was "copy UNIX". Where the wheels fell off Linux is the moment it got ahead of the UNIX legacy (i.e. modern desktops) and started having to compete with Windows, so suddenly the "copy UNIX" goal was no longer relevant. But Windows was made by Microsoft, or "the great satan" as Stallman memory called it.
So simply switching the goal to "copy Windows" wasn't possible because Windows and UNIX were very different and anyway, lots of people hated Windows. Linux had picked up a lot of semi-technical and technical users who didn't care much about FOSS purity but loved the club feeling that using an obscure OS brought them. The end result was big splits and bizarre, illogical design decisions being made simply because "do it like Windows did" was ideologically unthinkable, even when Windows had basically got it right (or at least, less wrong).