It's hard to know why projects didn't get traction. Is it because the documentation is not as good as it could have been? Is it because the marketing was insufficient? There are some projects out there which are similar to some of my projects and which did get traction and they have basically the same level of polish and documentation. I feel like it just comes down to marketing which itself just comes down to social connections. I'm quite certain now that if someone like Elon Musk looked at some of my projects and promoted them, they'd get tons of traction. The user feedback on some of my projects has been very good but it appears that none of my users has been a high-exposure individual.
On one of my open source projects which did get a little bit of initial traction, at one point traction slowed down and I was paranoid and thought that the code could be improved more and I reworked a lot of stuff to make it work optimally with Kubernetes. But some years down the line I found out that a significant subset of my users actually preferred how it worked before and were still using the old version. I still think it was a good move because the new architecture is much simpler and more elegant but probably not necessary as it didn't help my project get more traction.
Sometimes the only problem is just marketing and social networking and if you're not born at the right place and right time, there's nothing you can do about it.
On one of my open source projects which did get a little bit of initial traction, at one point traction slowed down and I was paranoid and thought that the code could be improved more and I reworked a lot of stuff to make it work optimally with Kubernetes. But some years down the line I found out that a significant subset of my users actually preferred how it worked before and were still using the old version. I still think it was a good move because the new architecture is much simpler and more elegant but probably not necessary as it didn't help my project get more traction.
Sometimes the only problem is just marketing and social networking and if you're not born at the right place and right time, there's nothing you can do about it.