I was going to reply sooner, but I wanted some time to mull things over before replying…
In fairness, I think you may have interpreted a few cases of “the idea is good/alright, but it could be better by doing X” as being “this is a terrible idea”.
People will always sit around discussing potential improvements and comparing the Arduboy to other consoles, that’s just human nature, it doesn’t mean that they like the Arduboy any less.
Similarly different people will always have different visions for the Arduboy’s future.
Compromising those different ideas into something the majority of people would be happy with is never going to be easy.
Ultimately making a product is about creating something people will buy,
not making something perfect.
From what I little know of other consoles of a similar nature,
that’s actually much better than most.
The majority of customers are going to be people who just want to play games and don’t care about learning how to program or getting involved in forum life, that’s the nature of the beast.
That doesn’t mean an Arduboy is wasted on them though.
If you only sold to people who wanted to program,
you’d probably have never have got off the ground in the first place.
You’ll even get programmers who just want to keep to themselves and don’t want to share their code.
Then there’s the people who just won’t join the forum for whatever reason, they’ll only use Twitter or Reddit.
And then there’s the few where the language barrier is probably the main issue.
(I’m thinking in particular of Cobinee, who has created several Arduboy games and published them on their Japanese blog.)
Most of which have stupidly high-power CPUs (ESP, Cortex M7, anything with an FPU), abandoned or disorganised forums, poor APIs, poor documentation, et cetera…
Basically lots of things that make them unappealing.
The Arduboy isn’t perfect, but it does a good job on the things that matter, and it fills a niche.
