OOS doesn't suck it just needs more designers involved.

I am a pretty experienced designer focusing on interface design and have tried a couple of times to get involved in these kinds of projects.

But what often happens is that they coders don't really want to have designers involved before at the very end where needless to say the software suddenly dictates the experience.

It's a perfectly solvable problem and have nothing to do with OSS as such but the same thing that hit many big corporate projects.

You decide the platform before you decide on the product.