Starting from version 3.14, Gnome terminal developers were removing feature after feature. I was watching as, after Ubuntu 12.04, terminal was becoming more and more useless. I have to manually build the older versions of gnome-terminal for subsequent Ubuntu versions.
Does someone know, whether restoring at least certain features (such as setting immutable tab title prefix) could be in nearest plans?
It’s hard to determine that from feature requests, and developers aren’t willing to elaborate on that.
The problem with an abundance of features is that there has to be someone willing to maintain them.
And GNOME is not exactly aiming at the poweruser but rather at plain users and beginners. If you need more features you can always install a Terminal that fits your needs better. Ubuntu is always trying to keep the delta to upstream GNOME as small as possible and to offer a clean and easy to use desktop by default. So I guess that you would have to be very convincing to make them add patches (which might be a burden to maintain again).
The problem with abundance of features in gnome-terminal is the developers destroyed the actually useful features. I begin wondering whether they actually use their own piece of software.
When you keep quite a set of terminals, setting their titles (to a form “prefix + program-defined part”) helps immensely to navigate. Now please tell me why this feature has been removed? Have the developers asked the users about that? No. They just removed. And a number of other features as well.
This is the question of convenience. Gnome-terminal wasn’t “superpowered” at all.
Judging by what I see in responses in the mentioned bug tracker, it makes little sense to convince those who ignore the inquires.