But yes, I recognize the struggle. At my RoboCup team (TechUnited Eindhoven), the learning curve is also steep: from non-CS students that use Matlab on Windows, to using Linux with C++ & Python, ROS, git, not to mention our own stuff on top.
It's a filter, to say the least.
Maybe there's room for an Eve-Mech bridge where Eve can be used on the knowledge representation side, and Mech for the lower-level motion planning stuff. That's a fun thought!
A hybrid system is a really interesting idea. I actually wrote my bachelors thesis on a system heavily inspired by EVE to be used for knowledge representation in robotics and have been experimenting a lot with implementations of the idea over the years. You should really open a Mech discord channel, I'd love to hang around and help build something like that :D.
GPU/FPGA Mech has been my dream since like... forever. I started taking a crack at it here: https://gitlab.com/mech-lang/core/-/blob/gpu/src/bin/gpu.rs, but mostly I was just figuring out wgpu's capabilities in Rust. But that was months ago and I've since decided to push it off until after I launch what I have done already.
I have a private slack that I've been using to work with my students, I'd love to send you an invite. Send me an email at [email protected] and I'll send it to you. I've been putting off doing a discord channel because I wanted to code up a chat app in Mech instead :P I think I'm almost there but I've been thinking that for years >_<. If I don't have one by the time I launch in October I'll probably bite the bullet and do discord then.
The issue with ROS isn't the general idea of communicating nodes over a blackboard and the accompanying standard libraries, but the huge pile of low quality tools, sparse documentation, ad-hoc architecture, bad code, and mediocre introspection tooling. A lot of that can be traced back to C++ and CMake, but ROS manages to take already complex tools and make them even more complex in an attempt to make them easy with automagic.
If ROS2 had just opted for ProtoBuffers/FlatBuffers/CaptnProto over MQTT/NATS and build TF et.al as a library over that, we could just point students to the excellent documentation of the Serialisation Format, of the Middleware and to the (with all that freed developer time) much better documentation of the Robotics libraries, and call it a day.
Instead they spend months with the idiosyncrasies of the build system, only to continue struggling with the documentation, and the sub-par tooling when something goes wrong. Cough only two seconds of time travel in ROSBags cough
I started building a ROS alternative called Mech (see my profile) after becoming frustrated with ROS. It’s getting there but not ready for prime time yet.
To answer the sibling comment, my biggest problem with ROS is how inscrutable it is for undergrads. I’ve witnessed students struggle to even install it while following directions step by step. It is a huge mess of incidental complexity, layering the complexity of C++ build systems on top of an IPC system on top of an expansive middleware.
The learning curve is so high that when I spend a semester teaching robotics, students still struggle with ROS basics at midterms. The course turns into more about learning ROS rather than learning actual robotics.
I’m hoping one day Mech will work along side and in conjunction with ROS to provide an easier way of doing things for those who want to get right to the heart of robotics.