I am not particularly in love with the politics of the poster of the OP, but I agree with the sentiment.
I do a lot of work in usability - not development - and in my 12 years’ experience working with developers, while they’re not necessarily fat or unwashed, many (not all) of them are as arrogant as Red Skeezix and throw weird shapes about people being retarded when their programs don’t act in an intuitive manner - rather than their UIs being pieces of shit.
Stealing focus is a fucking huge pain in the arse. There are ways to pop up an alert window that, for example, flashes in the task bar (qv Outlook meeting reminders) and demands attention without causing fuckups. That the default behaviour is to do this, and requires setting changes or even recourse to TweakUI, which 99% of people wouldn’t understand/can’t install, is a dumb fucking piece of idiocy.
(The worst offender of all for me is IE. Fuck OFF you annoying turd of a program. The only reason I use it is that the shit fucking MS applications I use will only work in fucking IE. So I have to run the shit and it grabs focus every time there is conclusion of any kind of activity. CRAP CRAP CRAP.)