I agree, experience this, love it, etc.

The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.

Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?

If you’re building for the "love of the game", aren’t you unlikely to post an artifact that is produced towards the end of your project and targeted towards a publication (e.g. hacker news)? I recall Mitchell Hashimoto was saying he used to browse GitHub as if it were a social media (which it is) - perhaps that’s your jam.