You are correct that the problem is data. Kaldi is hard to use, but making it easier to use isn't as hard as getting good training data. Mozilla's project is a good start for some purposes. One flaw with it is that they're having people read sentences. When people read, they tend to speak more clearly than when they're figuring out what to say on the fly. This means models trained with Mozilla's data will tend to need people to speak extra clearly than eg. a model trained on conversational data.

(edits: spelling/grammar)