@Kevinjohn Gallagher - I'm sad that you misunderstood and misrepresent the content of my presentation which covered a lot more things that the discussion about the Vocal Minority.

For the record this was not on any of my slides:
"Never listen to the Vocal Minority – even if they’re right"

The discussion about the philosophies of the WordPress project was towards the end of my presentation, preceding the section on how you can contribute to the project.

The point I was making about the Vocal Minority was not to "ignore them even if they are right" but it was a frank statement about the fact that what we as developers think is important, or even what the vocal minority of users think is important, isn't always what is the most important thing. The point I wanted to make was that we should be thinking about the majority group of end users who make up our user base. I believe passionately that we need to listen to the voices that are hard to hear as well as those which are loud because otherwise we risk designing and developing for the minority.