Your second point is key. In an ideal world, open source could rival and even beat the best paid offerings (see: blender). But in most cases it just doesn’t. There’s not a dedicated team working on the open source products, working with HCI experts and designers on every detail of the product. It doesn’t preclude the open source being better (see, again: blender), but it does push a LOT of workload onto a bunch of hobbyist developers working in their spare time. The resultant burnout is typically why you see these projects sputtering along for years and years. I don’t know how to solve those problems either, but they’re your real “roadblocks”.
I suppose it all comes down to money, Blender is an exception rather than the rule. They get a lot of donations from big companies, so they can afford to have a lot of people working on the project full-time. Most projects don’t have that luxury, so they get stuck like you said.
To be honest, I don’t know if there is a way to solve this, if there is it certainly isn’t easy
Your second point is key. In an ideal world, open source could rival and even beat the best paid offerings (see: blender). But in most cases it just doesn’t. There’s not a dedicated team working on the open source products, working with HCI experts and designers on every detail of the product. It doesn’t preclude the open source being better (see, again: blender), but it does push a LOT of workload onto a bunch of hobbyist developers working in their spare time. The resultant burnout is typically why you see these projects sputtering along for years and years. I don’t know how to solve those problems either, but they’re your real “roadblocks”.
I suppose it all comes down to money, Blender is an exception rather than the rule. They get a lot of donations from big companies, so they can afford to have a lot of people working on the project full-time. Most projects don’t have that luxury, so they get stuck like you said.
To be honest, I don’t know if there is a way to solve this, if there is it certainly isn’t easy