Being a maintainer / project owner is not always fun, but it’s rewarding in a sense that you’re able to offer something useful to others.
I don’t like providing free support via github issues. And that’s usually what happens, you don’t get many developers that put care into bug reports. Instead it’s mostly users that don’t really understand, sometimes entitled, sometimes really nice but completely wrong.
However I really appreciate those that do care or at least follow the template and make an effort.
I see issues as a form of a necessity to help the software improve, but I’ve chosen to no longer pay too much attention to it because it’s just draining.
Support is draining, and I respect everyone who does it, those who provide support for free even moreso.
And because they are such black boxes, there’s the sector of Explainable AI which attempts to provide transparency.
However, in order to understand data from explainable AI, you still need domain experts that have experience in interpreting what that data means and how to make changes.
It’s almost as if any reasonably complex string of operations requires study. And that’s what tech marketing forgets. As you said, it all has to come from somewhere.