1. You are still defining usefulness from your perspective. What do the people in these niches say? If they say nothing, it likely means it is uninteresting or unaligned with how they work

2. Discord and/or Slack are good choices, I've personally written off Slack because they erase history after 3 months, which is really bad for small projects.

Why is customizing layers in a model through a UI helpful? To me, seeing their architecture is one thing, but if I change it I need to train it up and that's going to happen in Python. That is quite niche like robotics.

Free vs paid is often not about features, but about managed services, support, and certifications. If you run it yourself, that means you have more work.

Better does not always win out. There are several open source projects I am a big fan of, because they solve real problems, yet are rejected by industry because they are different and they are in a place of "everyone else is doing it this way" right now, despite the insane masochism this way of doing things represents (to me).

1. For my robotics tool, the response was really good. People enjoyed and even sent feedback and got a couple of issues opened on the repo too. I just think I need more reach for it.

2. Noted, thanks for the heads up!

You can quickly benchmark the model and compare it quickly by moving around/adding layers as you wish. But yeah your point makes sense too.

Makes sense. I too, know of many open-source projects in the same way. But when I compare with other open-source projects in the same niche which offer less features (as an example) getting more popularity. It just makes me think I am doing something wrong so that's why I asked.