Without complaints, many improvements wouldn’t happen.
And there are different kinds of complaining. There’s the useless whining and moaning, without saying exactly what the problem is. These can become useful if you can get the complainer to state their issues more clearly.
There are complaints with clear statements of the problem. These can be quite valuable. If there is a problem in the system, the problem needs to be fixed. If I hit the letter “P” on my keyboard, and your system continually interprets it as a backspace, that’s a problem that must be fixed. There could be multiple causes (bad keyboard, or the system itself mis interpreting the keystroke, for example). But it’s the kind of problem that requires a solution. You need people to point out these problems.
Then there’s the whining just because of change. Yes, these are not terribly helpful. But you can help people adapt to change. Something that TMF didn’t do a great job of, IMHO. But the community did step up to help other community members learn about this new software and how to adapt to it. That’s a great benefit of a good user community - helping each other.
And there is a group of people who learn to use the software, and only then decide that it just isn’t going to work for them. You really want to hear from those people. They are the ones who can provide some of the best feedback. They took the time to figure things out, and then can usually tell you pretty specifically what is and isn’t working for them. That lets developers and decision-makers both know how their choices are playing out in the real world.
So bring on the complaining, as long as the complaining is written and expressed in a useful way.
–Peter