To be honest this doesn't make sense. If the salt and pepper set only had "one function" which is to display advertising in your home (the analogy works pretty well, as I could imagine the set plastered with ads) it still has to work as a salt and pepper set, or people wouldn't use it.
In the example thread above, people are reacting by complaining about the problem. If they reacted by switching email providers, they wouldn’t be in that thread. I highly doubt Gmail’s active user count is affected by any more than a minuscule amount as a result.
to me, your explanation doesn't really explain how an active development team can ignore that issue. If it were just a handful of users talking about an esoteric corner case I could maybe understand.
