Given the supposed quality of top flight models there ought to be a lot more people forking open source projects, implementing missing features and releasing "xyz software that can do a and b".

Somehow it's not really happening.

I've actually been doing this for my own purposes - an adhoc buggy half-implemented low latency version of Project Wyoming from home assistant.

Repo, for those interested: https://github.com/jaggederest/pronghorn/

I find that the core issues really revolve around the audience - getting it good enough that I can use it for my own purposes, where I know the bugs and issues and understand how to use it, on the specific hardware, is fabulous. Getting it from there to "anyone with relatively low technical knowledge beyond the ability to set up home assistant", and "compatible with all the various RPi/smallboard computers" is a pretty enormous amount of work. So I suspect we'll see a lot of "homemade" software that is definitely not salable, but is definitely valuable and useful for the individual.

I hope, over the long to medium term, that these sorts of things will converge in an "rising tide lifts all boats" way so that the ecosystem is healthier and more vibrant, but I worry that what we may see is a resurgence of shovelware.

I have already forked open source software to fix issues or enhance it via coding agents. I put it on github publicly, so other people can use it if they see it, but I don't announce it anywhere. I don't want to deal with user complaints any more than the current maintainers do. (I'm also not going to post my github profile here since it has my legal name and is trivially linked to my home address.)

Because it still requires the desire to do it.