Item one: people contribute to open source projects if it scratches an itch or it makes them money somehow. But considering what ardour does, most of your user

Item one: people contribute to open source projects if it scratches an itch or it makes them money somehow. But considering what ardour does, most of your users are not developers. You're relying on the small subset of audio engineers that are also programmers to get an itch. Or a check from... who? Maybe you can or are already getting sponsorships from hardware manufacturers, I have no idea, your software goes over my head :) Item two: it's 1000x harder to read code than to write it. Maybe perl had it right, being write only. They just admitted no one wants to read code :) So when someone wants to add minor functionality (they have an itch or it improves their paycheck) it's normal that they don't want to go through all the internals, no matter how well documented your source code is. It's much easier to make changes via a minimalistic (and documented like an API!) plugin system. Especially if you're an audio engineer, not a professional programmer. I don't think having a 'build' step is much of a barrier to entry. It's more the lack of competence (because the users aren't programmers) or itch. Even if it were a steaming pile of javascript, it would still be a pain to set up on windows.