The backwards compatibility is really a challenge, but I think more importantly dumping Knockout and Luma and all that insanity and going towards the Hyva route, or going more-headlessy with a good starter theme would encourage people enourmously.
Magento's frontend cluster-F is the reason we moved away from it. It was great to have such a good pricing engine, integrations pieces, currency support etc, but all of that skillset which is magento's core capability being a really well rounded online OMS is overshadowed by long and expensive turn arounds on frontend work.
Re:frontend, you're absolutely correct. Magento's frontend is a sad state. MageOS is actively looking for ways to move Luma/Blank into a separate installable package so that devs are not forced to see it at every turn.
In terms of Headless, there are a bunch of different heads at this point, but none have yet solved what I call the "upgrade-safe theme" problem.
I like what we've done with Daffodil since it doesn't impose any of those limitations that come with themes, while still handling a lot of the complexity that devs face when building ecommerce stores.
If you can make a name for yourself, you can do very well. Especially for Magento, I love the fact that I can make small change, deliver it as a composer package, and then (if the code is good enough) see the results on many brands within a few months.
It's hard to get that close-to-customer visibility anywhere else as most "cool" large scale FOSS projects are dev focused, which means your impact on the lay user is less obvious.
The goal is to migrate management of the codebase out of Adobe's hands back into the community's. Community PRs, triage, etc.
We're currently working on getting the entire CI pipeline setup in Github Actions (if you're interested in contributing, we could really use friendly faces, it's quite an undertaking). Once we're past that, we have goals that are in progress:
DevX:
1. Correct the dep graph of MageOS to be a legitimate DAG and then use nx/bazel/make, etc to compute the build graph. 2. Create codespaces/gitpods/devcontainers for easier day 1 devs. 3. Rip GraphQl out into a separate package space. 4. Create smaller more use-case specific metapackages so that you're not forced into all of Magento or nothing. 5. Maintain backwards compatibility with existing Magento packages.
UX: 1. Significantly improve overall performance.
MerchX: 1. Improve Merch documentation and make Merch docs easier to consume.
Generally to your question, we're not interested in maintenance, we're interested in taking on the burden of being a better development effort alongside a better merchant experience.
That said, this is not a sales pitch. The problem is hard, but we'd like to prove that we're harder.