It isnt. There are many projects which work with users making a
contribution without payment. You must know this.
My thoughts -
- Some users want to remain anonymous. That wouldnt stop them contributing. Perfectly possible to work on GitHub anonymous and over Tor.
- The roadmap includes moving features out of dom0. That’s stated over and over. But any one can start contributing by starting squashing bugs.
- Do you find the instructions in qubesbuilderv2 not simple? They seem straightforward. The number of repositories may seem difficult to start with. It isnt difficult to find where some feature or program is packaged, and then to find the repository that provides that package. But you can always ask.
- You overstate the difficulties in working with the team. The primary place to discuss features, difficulties, etc should be qubes-devel. Look at how @qubist is handling changes to firewall, and BenGrande. This is clearly stated under contributing in the docs.
- No one should expect to work on a feature in isolation, and then hope for it to be accepted. Work on a bug within existing framework, or propose a new feature etc. That seems to be how progress is best made.
I said much earlier - the number of people in the core team does not
equate to the number of contributors.
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.