Another example, intentionally not systemd related:

If you use any of: backups, snapshots, nfs, etc, you'd want to have all
per-user "no data loss on failure/deletion" files in a common dir, such as
~/.cache, to make it easy to exclude or bind-mount. Currently, such caches
are strewn around hundreds random dirs all around, often buried deeply like
~/.mozilla/firefox/1hommji5.default/Cache/ (this one fortunately recently
got fixed). And upstreams are often hostile to requests to move those, for
a variety of reasons.

I proposed to make cache under ~/.cache an official policy, but met with
negative popular response (just on IRC, to judge whether to go forward).
Turns out maintainers don't want to diverge from upstreams, especially when
it'd be burden of carrying and maintaining a patch.

So what's the proper response? Crying mommy to the CTTE?
Axel Beckert instead created "unburden-home-dir", a package to move/symlink
such directories to a place of your choice, including reapplying such
symlinks on every login (in case they get lost), and even undoing the
changes.

Thus: while a hostile maintainer can make it harder for you, all it takes to
create a workaround is some will and effort.


Meow!
--
A tit a day keeps the vet away.