Hi @SamIAm I was going to reply to your PM but since you made a public post we can keep conversation here.
The initiative is for sure appreciated but as others have certainly noticed it is much easier to handle developments on plugin side vs system features.
Open-source development has a lot of “one-off” contributions, where an author/developer wants to see something happen in a certain software and pushes for that feature (which is nice of course) but from my experience they do not stick around to maintain it and assume the main developer of whatever they are targeting will take care of future maintenance.
For MOD’s case even if developers would stick around to maintain their contributed part of the codebase, it creates an imbalance due to their work not being remunerated or compensated.
And I would say at this point the main pain points for new users coming to the MOD platform are not the lack of features but a matter of polish and quality of the whole experience. There are a few features that would be quite nice to have, but we can still improve on a lot of things before we consider new ones.
And @redcloud is on point, for now it is just me taking care of plugin store management, releases, kernel updates and fixes, cloud issues and many other tasks.
As much as I would like to lead efforts for getting more stuff done via contributions, my time is already quite filled up and I think it is already frustrating to some other devs here that were hoping to see their stuff more actively integrated…
The best so far is to have contributions for things either
- MOD is working towards too (or)
- are self-contained not risking breaking anything else on the system.
I have seen developers that were once quite engaged trying to push for a feature slowly give up on the entire thing because our (MOD) side moves too slow and cannot accommodate their request in a timely fashion (or quick enough before they lose interest).
It is just hard to justify spending time on these things when we are the ones that need to keep maintaining them forever, if anything breaks during updates we cannot rely on someone that once pushed a feature X months/years ago again as they have 0 obligation to come to our help.
One recent item that got some fixes (still in progress) is the tuner, that is self-contained enough that we can change things without potentially breaking the rest of the system. @brummer is taking the lead on that and it is very appreciated. Helps a lot that the original tuner implementation was from him too 
This is why plugins are a much safer part of the ecosystem to target, though yeah it is also very technical in nature.
Thing is, dealing with plugins does not have to be just code. Thinking out loud there are quite a few things that help the whole community a lot and does not need coding skills:
- make list of plugins that have direct replacements, so eventually we could put them in a “legacy” category, perhaps to even be hidden from the store - with the result being less user confusion with many plugins that do the same thing
- become “manager” or “owner” of certain plugins, then creating a forum topic specific for a plugin so that questions/discussion around it happen on it but one person is the “master” that knows the plugin very well - we could easily add the “see discussion” button for these forum posts, helping users to find more information about random plugins and having a centralized place for discussing it
We kinda already have this for new plugins where the developers are directly involved with their publication to the store, like aidadsp and looperlative, but many older ones like CAPS and TAP that we ported over into the platform do not have the original developer on board.
It should be possible to organize people around certain plugins, where they become the ones to talk to about them.
- somewhat related to the previous point, suggestions for updated plugin descriptions are always welcome.
- mini communities around a specific kind of platform, like max-gen, puredata etc. some of this already in progress
now offtopic, but what I am doing at the moment I hope to be useful for the plugin situation… based on the modgen by another developer here on the forums, trying to get a “cloud builder” that can deal with building max-gen, max-rnbo, faust, puredata, etc based plugins in a easy way. so the mini-communities can grow more organically, without users needing to roll their own docker services and alike.
then also have the same platform host all the current “beta” plugins on the store, since the logic for pushing plugins to a device is the same anyway. this would allow us to finally clean up the entire store of those plugins that we once uploaded but for sure are never going to be put in stable.
for now the case of max-gen builds takes priority as it is something that was working before but got broken, so trying to fix that as soon as possible. then extending to other build types.
) For better or worse, I’d say it’s a big part of the brand, maybe more so now with the focus on the desktop app.