Open source is necessary but not sufficient to draw in contributors/enthusiasts. If it's a huge effort to get the thing to build, that is an impediment and redu

Open source is necessary but not sufficient to draw in contributors/enthusiasts. If it's a huge effort to get the thing to build, that is an impediment and reduces the pool of folks who are willing to put in the effort to be able to contribute. If "the code is the documentation" and folks are expected to reverse engineer how it works from the code -- another barrier to deter folks. And so on. A plugin architecture may be the sweet spot to pull in technical folks without imposing the complete learning curve on them. Examples such as Firefox plugins, gimp plugins, NextCloud apps, etc. come to mind.