At Red Hat, this would usually mostly be a PM+dev+QE decision, not C level. If C level got involved, that meant massive customer impairment. There are simply too many open bugs to spend time on something that no customer is apparently interested in, but if a customer came along with a big burning problem and there was no way for them to architect around it, they'd usually fix something like this.
When I worked at Red Hat (virtualization-related, but not libvirt) we had a case where a customer would be running a configuration which was... unwise. We still spent a lot of time figuring out how to help them and shipped a patch that made their life easier.
The people working there are not evil, they don't intentionally not fix things, but a bug that is seen as a minor limitation and hasn't popped up in any customer case in 5+ years simply won't get fixed. There hundreds if not thousands of other bugs that are more urgent and only so many developers, QE engineers, docs people to work on this. Even if someone wrote a patch for it, it may not get merged due to how expensive Red Hats process for shipping a change is.
When I worked at Red Hat (virtualization-related, but not libvirt) we had a case where a customer would be running a configuration which was... unwise. We still spent a lot of time figuring out how to help them and shipped a patch that made their life easier.
The people working there are not evil, they don't intentionally not fix things, but a bug that is seen as a minor limitation and hasn't popped up in any customer case in 5+ years simply won't get fixed. There hundreds if not thousands of other bugs that are more urgent and only so many developers, QE engineers, docs people to work on this. Even if someone wrote a patch for it, it may not get merged due to how expensive Red Hats process for shipping a change is.