I think the example being argued is exemplar of bikeshedding. It’s literally one character of formatting in quite a large app.
I actually really respect the criticism being offered here that we aren’t as transparent enough about our goals. I think a loose roadmap would be a good thing for us to provide. However, I sincerely doubt “removing character in the right gutter” would have made it on there anyway.
We can’t possibly be expected to open a new topic to debate every little UX change we make. Achieving consensus would be impossible and it would slow development down to a crawl. I am really not sure if people understand how much extra work they are asking us to do here.
I firmly believe for little changes like that, it is far easier to just change it in master and let users start playing with it. Sometimes it’s an improvement, sometimes it sucks. We can always put it back. We do this often.