Thank you for all of that!
I have so many questions that are currently unanswered, I’ve decided it’s impractical to actually ask them all – I’ve already exceeded the bandwidth of the available providers. (Which is not a knock against them! This is a simple matter of physics.) And I’ve decided that the most important thing to understand (and help other newcomers understand) is the topic of this thread.
But I’d like to get all the answers eventually and get them into the docs in some form, and I absolutely think there’s a place for “candid lore” like this near the top. (If this were a private team, I’d copy-paste your post right into ONBOARDING.md.) I don’t know how others here feel about that sort of candidness being “unprofessional” or disparaging and thus distasteful to publish, but I believe it’s foundational to aligning with the reality on the ground.
I’ll probably make a PR along these grounds after 43 is out the door and things are settled down, and we can negotiate the verbiage then. I’ve realized that even though we have paid people working here, it’s still like any other open-source project: it’s not really about my availability, it’s about the availability of others on the project (until / unless I become a “maintainer” or equivalent).
By the way, I’m frequently tempted here to “just get to work” and ship some bits to prod instead of being the noisy newcomer, but I can’t seem to ignore these onboarding gaps because I think they’re all addressable. And frankly, I wish I had been able to join years ago, but I didn’t have the cycles necessary to penetrate this opacity. So I’ll continue to do my best to reduce it while I have the time. All of which is to say: thanks again, and I’ll try to multiply any time spent with me on this.