Well, projects getting off to a strong start and then falling apart
halfway through is hardly unique to the world of Blind Linux
Accessibility, or even the world of software development. Many an
author has started writing a novel only to leave it half finished or
to discard the draft and start over, many an inventor has made a
prototype that never makes it to market, many a painter has left half
a canvas blank, and yes, many a programmer has abandoned their code in
a buggy, barely compiles if at all mess. The reasons for such failures
are myriad, from a creator losing interest to the project proving more
time consuming than they expected or beyond their skills to the
creator's health failing to legal issues to running out of resources
needed to complete the project, be it some hard to obtain materials,
breakdown of equipment, or running out of money. However, if everyone
were to let the fear of not finishing something stop them from
starting, nothing would ever get done, and at least when it comes to
FOSS, we can take some consolation in that, when a project is
abandoned, the incomplete work is often left behind in a form so that
another might continue it whereas often the best you can do with
abandoned proprietary software is hack the binary via hex editor or
disassembly and hope whoever holds the copyright doesn't decide to sue
you.
Going more specific again, Blind Accessibility is a niche and desktop
Linux is a niche, so we blind linux users find ourselves in a niche of
a niche, so indeed, it's hard to garner interest and harder still to
find people with the skills needed to make even marginal improvements.
As for configuration, I'm not sure it's really fair to say GUIs handle
configuration one way and CLI handles it another. There are plenty of
GUI applications that save configuration as a plain text file and
plenty of terminal applications that use more complex means of storing
settings, and where the choice between using a setting's dialog or
editing raw configu files, my experience is that it's a coin toss as
to which method will be easier for a specific program.
That said, there are plenty of programs that could use a better
settings dialog or an easier to understand config file and plenty of
programs that could stand to be a bit more beginner friendly and/or
more flexible to advanced users.
Also, automation is awesome. I have a directory with a few dozen shell
scripts, many of which are just a single command line for programs I
use just infrequently enough that I can't remember all the relevant
command line options and some of which executes the same command on
every file in the working directory because the command can only be
used on one file at a time.
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