Garbee has been a Debian developer since 1994 and, thus, is certainly well placed to talk about a sensible way that desktop development should take.
Though American, he can claim to be more Australian than most Linux conference goers in this land, having attended every single LCA right from 2002, presented at some and been a keynote speaker before.
In large part, his views appear to be shaped by the increasing complexity of free and open source software, complexity that is taking away the ability to enable users to do things their own way. The strengths that made free and open source software what it was are now being lost.