Disappointing that "rust lol" is the top option in the poll, and none of the other options are about usability or utility.

No one gives a single shit what language the thing is written in. What users care about is how monstrously complex and difficult it is to use OpenWRT.

Anything more complex than changing SSID and password requires trawling through two different outdated wikis and years-old forum posts. That's if your search engine can even find something other than thousands of people asking the same question over the years.

OpenWRT needs to be usable and approachable. Any random person off the street should be able to walk up and configure their network. Even for highly technical users it's a struggle to do anything.

It does not matter one single bit whether there's rust in the codebase if it's never run because no one can figure out how to use it.

Rust is not a feature. It's an implementation detail that absolutely no one cares about and does not affect the user in any way. I'm really sick of this shit.

Every item on the poll is something that I - as someone who has never used OpenWRT but might be interested in it to replace what I have now - do know know why I care. If I developed OpenWRT I'd have an opinion on Rust, but since I don't I shouldn't have an opinion.

You can't extrapolate with polls with so many votes. I'm here an hour after you and Rust is at 4%. There's only been 66 votes so far, I bet you just ran into it very early.

Very true. I recently wasted days trying to setup IPSec on OpenWRT with no success. IPSec support is broken into dozens of packages without proper dependency resolution. No GUI support. Sparse documentation, and what little documentation is out there is outdated and mostly consists of sample configs rather than true documentation. You see, OpenWRT likes to break configs from version to version and the docs are never updated. You can't follow documentation from upstream because OpenWRT auto-generates the package's config files from its own configs. Which are sparsely documented.

"Helpful" forum posts mostly suggested to "use Wireguard" with a notion that IPSec is an archaic protocol that is not worth anyone's time to support, and the user is dumber for trying to use it.

Hardly.

I give a shit what language the thing is written in. Right now it's c for uhttpd + lua for luci. I would prefer to cut as much of both as possible from firmware of devices on my network. Not only that, trying to write decent modern UI on top of this stack is not worth the hassle and it dramatically reduces number of people who can volunteer such work.