It looks to me like they tried to flinch or at least didn't close it like almost everything UX I've seen on the chromium bug site. Pretty impressive given that while gnome is external its not an actual standard of the sort the Posix or RFC networking gangs kick each other in the crotch over. If they aren't publishing formal standards to an outside body that starts picking up independent interested parties, I think they will have more options to go down from their current quality whether or not the current quality is acceptable to critics today.