No one is stopping anyone from writing applications by themselves and distributing them by standard installation packages on a website, like what has been commo

No one is stopping anyone from writing applications by themselves and distributing them by standard installation packages on a website, like what has been common since about 1995. No one is forcing you to set up an open-source project with distributed source control. No one is making you deploy on the app stores. Those are complex systems, and so it's no surprise that setting them up is non-trivial. Learning about Git is almost certain to be simpler than re-writing something Git-like every time you want a DVCS. Submitting to an app store is probably easier than trying to get your program listed in every software directory that exists for a given platform outside of that app store. Of course these things can be simplified a bit, and likely will be, but I think the current state of things is expected as part of the transition to new models of collaborative work and software distribution.