For everyone complaning, keep in mind the following...
1) Everyone involved in the various projects are doing this for free. You can't reasonably expect to make demands for donated time. I would imagine most have full-time jobs which limits available time.
2) You have FREE access to an extremely powerful platform to use as you choose. There is no way a small to medium company could build 1/2 the feature set that DNN has and keep it current.
3) This product gives you a huge leg up on building a sophisticated website for yourself or your clients.
Recent example from this past week...
Just this week, we just bid on a large job that required logins, granular permissions, galleries, newsletters, events calendars,announcements, RSS feeds, etc,. Every thing that DNN has built in. Plus it needed several custom modules. There were four bidding companies that had to make presentations to a staff of about 20 people.
I spent most of my talking about DNN, and that if any of my competitors, most of which were also small frms were proposing to build these features, or use their own system, they were not going to get nearly as good a product are we were going to provide with DNN.
I continued to tell them that typically, you get 80% of any result with 20% of the effort. It is the last 20% (the finishing touches) that takes 80% of the effort. I then mentioned that 90% of their project requirements were already built into DNN, and 99% of our budgeted time on the project would be on their specific requirements (modules), as opposed to building message boards, logins and everything else. I also mentioned that its a Microsoft based platform and there are many developers available.
I was able to make a case to them that if they were not using DNN or a simlar CMS and hired someone to build everything, that they were making a big mistake and could not get as good a finished product. I also mentioned that if we were hired as a consultant we would be making the same recommendation to them. In the end it was a compelling arguement, that I could not have made without DNN.
While certain announcements, and communication could be better, everyone is limited on time and you have an incredible FREE resource available to use, and you should be grateful to have it available to you.
ON another topic, maybe there should be some type of minor tasks list on a new section of the site for items that needed to be completed. This could be content for newsletters, content for a section of the site, or anything else. I would imagine that more people would contribute if such a resource were more readily available. It could even be project specific. People who have made modifications to various projects could list these changes and the various team members could incorporate these changes if appropriate. If anyone likes this idea, we can make a separate thread and bounce the idea around more.