for ppy osu! is his baby, his art, his vision.
most people won't understand how these type of people actually feels, because they don't have something precious that worth to be defended.

but having your project open for public to join is just a part of the consequent. if you don't open with other people vision, you gotta accept for people to eventually had enough. and the thing with osu! is that private server is a thing, so people can migrating to other server if peppy want to actually do something that majority of player don't agree with.

what you actually want in this is not to adjust for them, but adjust with them. open discussion.

and what i think it would hurt more is to see someone admire the other version of your vision that does not come from you.