There are so many problems working in tandem here: - Leaky abstractions which are treated/documented as if they're perfect. Read a file, do a thing, write a fi

There are so many problems working in tandem here: - Leaky abstractions which are treated/documented as if they're perfect. Read a file, do a thing, write a file. Except when running in parallel, things are never that simple. - Lots of important projects ("base of Arch Linux" level important) still don't have public repos, an official site (or even page) with references, bug tracker, or any reasonable way of contacting the maintainers. How do these projects get updated? I guess they simply don't. - Even the best feedback mechanisms are still awful. Figuring out whether something is effectively abandoned before spending 30+ minutes writing up a bug report could take longer than writing the bug report itself, encouraging writing the absolute minimum (which ends up being less than minimum half the time). Every project is also its own unique snowflake. They want different types and amounts of information, some won't touch an issue unless it's reproducible in the very latest commit (requiring hours of setup and lots of domain knowledge to compile the damn thing), and they all have a completely different process. - Most tools are still skewed towards one maintainer per project. Take any random GitHub abandonware as an example. You can fork it with one click, but so have 20 other people. You can put up a web site for your fork, but search engines will rank the original web site (or just the GitHub repo) highest for years. You can rename it, but now you've just burned bridges with all the other forks and the original repo, in ways which would be difficult to repair. Now try to migrate all the issues, mailing list, forum, IRC channel or other communications. It's basically hopeless unless the original maintainer is completely on board. - Most open source software solves only the author's immediate problem. But not a single user of the software has exactly the same problem to solve as the original author. So pretty much by definition no library will solve the problem you are dealing with. Maybe one way out of this mess for any particular language might be if the standard library was meant to grow to take over popular code, possibly with a tiered approach. You could nominate a library, then it would go through reviews, extensive testing, the whole shebang, before being accepted into a low level "this might someday be part of the standard library in some form" tier. This ideally would make it possible for example to replace core libraries in steps, steadily pushing the old one out of core and pulling a better alternative in.