Hi @KasMA1990 ,
you’re observations are shared with many in the community. While the topic is a large one, being a frequent Elm community member since 2017 I can share some of my experience.
I agree. I’ve seen those kind of posts several times throughout the past years and they are terrible if you’re trying to convince someone to try Elm and that’s what they find. The frustration that led to these posts is in my opinion partly due to restrictions and lack of opportunity to contribute.
That’s the core of the issue in my opinion. I haven’t seen lots of community members be able to contribute in a way that actually leads to progress. From what you can read online Evan often wants people to do lots of research before they can contribute, which means the bar for contribution is high, which I consider a good thing. On the other hand, some people actually seem to do the work (example here and here ) and still nothing happens, which is super frustrating to do a bunch of work only to get nowhere.
I am not sure that his busyness is the problem here. Apparently Evan is paid to work on Elm full-time so and can choose freely what he is working on. I think Elm is brilliant and the way that it does things differently is courageous. BUT to me there has got to be some middle ground between asking for everyone’s approval in the community and basically refusing to interact with the community on a frequent basis. Coordinating many helping hands requires time and of course Evan’s time is valuable, but to me that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done at all. I think Elm could grow pretty well and stay true to its ideals with a little more opportunity for contribution. Even if community won’t be involved in design decisions it would be great if they at least got a chance to fix some of the long outstanding bugs and issues (like this one or this one) especially if some of them are one-line fixes.
I believe there was a bunch of angry discussions between Evan and the community memebers before 0.18 (before I joined the community) that lead to the situation being the way it is now.
I still very much enjoy using Elm and being a part of the community and I hope that the path for productive community engagement will open again someday. But that depends in large part whether Evan thinks this is good use of his time which probably isn’t the case right now. Anyway good to bring this topic up every now and then.