Apache has amazing content as well as a “human” touch.
This site demonstrates that someone put some effort into the design, so perhaps the easy solution is to spend even more time on marketing and skip the design-o-tron.
I never said, nor meant to imply, judgements about any other projects. I was simply sharing the choices we've made based on our priorities and resources.
Personally I'm comfortable with those choices because they've resulted in literally hundreds (>650 at my last count) of nice looking and fun to use coding tutorials. I'm also quite proud of the authoring flow we built: these codelabs are generated directly from Google Docs (you don't have to write a line of code to produce them) and we've open sourced the tools for others to use (https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools).