In all seriousness, you’re totally right. And usually it’s these “other parts” that make or break an open source project; particularly documentation, but also graphic and interaction design, usability, and so forth. I created a slide for a preso once that charted the “Chasm of Usefulness” and the 80/20 principle. The idea being that you could get often as much as 80% of the value of a tool with 20% of the effort but to reach truly “great” software you had to cross a chasm to the “other side” of professionally designed and executed software. There’s no question it’s hard; more contributors in all disciplines would surely help.

Of course, more indians means you need some chiefs. Now we need open source project managers/leaders…

It would be fun to download every project on RIAForge and see how many had any usable documentation…