Truth is, Calibre is a hard project to run, the man has been doing it himself, and he is super responsive and helpful in forums.
Every thread about Calibre a has a comment like this shitting on Goyal based on one or two of his comments, and then there are some comments that talk about how helpful he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
How could anyone support Goodreads seeing as their api is closed off? Thankfully calibre has the goodreads-sync plugin which still works as well as it does.
> watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off"
... which seems to be a quote that you just made up. I might be wrong (maybe you meant to link to another thread and mixed up your links, or maybe the link you provided wasn't supposed to actually be evidence for the quoted part), but it seems like not.
This is a horrible practice, and you should stop.* (It's actually against the rules on HN[1][2], but you shouldn't do it anywhere. It's lame.)
* Yes, even in circumstances where you profess to have no intent of misleading people and are just "paraphrasing"—that's not how paraphrasing works to begin with, and the person's own words should be sufficient[3] to indict if they are in fact sufficient to indict them.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600284#13602947>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551#15890822> (you'll need showdead turned on)
3. e.g. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2011720#yui_3_10_3_1...>
Step a new user through setting up Calibre to do something as simple as syncing to a e-reader with the functionality a user would normally expect, like displaying/syncing their reading progress.
Or just watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off" and then a bunch of other folks get into the weeds describing the mess of plugins and shit you need to do it.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I managed to get my e-reader to sync reading position to Calibre but it required a lot of frustrating work trying to follow tutorials on mobiread...creating custom fields and code snippets and praying that the whole thing won't break some time in the future.
It's probably the single most commonly wanted feature for a user looking at an e-book library management tool. That and syncing to their e-reader's shelves.
God help you if you want to use Goodreads...