I see zero changes in this market bifurcation pattern regardless of industry. It’s not like people are making their own clothes much even in developing countries because we overproduce cheap clothes now anyway, for example.

But yeah, it‘s not the same. It doesn‘t get you anywhere close to "producing“ the real software. You‘re programming in a walled garden layer above userspace that you can‘t get out of. To me, these kinds of things are enough to give me hope though (setting aside the ideals of open source). The incentives for learning how to "produce“ real software are strong enough. If more people can build tools for themselves, I‘m happy.

I agree that it would be better for everyone if there were competitive fully open source platforms across the entire stack, but don’t confuse the ability to produce and use open source software with the requirement that absolutely all the stack must be open source. Only Siths deal in absolutes.

Because without this your projects are always at the mercy of Microsoft's auto update. There's more to life than MVC frameworks. Some people want to be in control of their data. On, say, LineageOS you can rewrite system apps; on iOS your phone will always be a cop and you can't change that.

You don't. You need root access and unlocked devices to produce people who give a shit about coding. We're training people to look under the hood less and less and less every year.

It’s 100% a matter of skills and motivation.

Hate to break it to you but the average person does not wake up and think "you know what I want to do for the next 40 years? look at code for 8 hours a day." Wanting to do this is a weird thing (and that's okay) and it means you have different desires than my mom who likes watching youtube on her iphone.