What arbitrary line of popularity suddenly requires me to support every use-case, by never breaking something in a project nobody is paying me to build?
10 people? 100? 100,000?
The answer is: none because the premise is false.
FOSS maintainers owe you NOTHING. Nada. Zip. That includes a working copy of the software, and you agreed to that stipulation in the license. That's what "no warranty of fitness any purpose" means.
That includes not owing you any specific method of project "governance" or versioning scheme, it includes not owing you releases, ever.
Also, what counts as "dicking over" a user? That sounds arbitrary too.
- Refusing to answer their questions?
- Removing a feature they liked because it was a nightmare to maintain?
- Leaving a bug in place because trying to fix it sounds unfun?
- Introducing a bug because you didn't realize there was an interaction between two features?
- Deciding that tests are no fun, and deleting all of them, increasing the likelihood of bugs?
- Deciding that documentation is out of date, too much of a pain to keep updating, and removing it wholesale to avoid confusion because it's inaccurate anyway?
FOSS maintainers have no obligations to you. None. No arbitrary line of popularity changes that.
I build my open source projects for fun and for free. Your decision to use what my fun produces doesn't suddenly require me to have my fun in a specific way. It doesn't obligate me to ensure the output of my fun never breaks your production environment.