The story is acted out by elementary school students in this video -- showing things don't always have to be perfect or polished to be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krptm4-mTDM
I've found this entire discussion enlightening. I especially liked the comment about the story of a baker who starts a bakery and soon finds out that being the owner/manager of a successful bakery actually has little in common with baking skills (even as baking is obviously important to a bakery).
For me, as with some other posters here, a big issue for programming projects I start is that while you are working on a project -- as a programmer who likes to program (working person-to-machine) -- the programming is usually fun. And also you can also imagine anything about the potential value of the results while things are under development. But when a project is "done", then getting others to try a project and dealing with support questions or major design feedback and such involves a whole different set of skills (working person-to-person). And those tasks -- especially promotion and support -- are probably are not fun things for a typical programmer. And also you might have guessed wrong about the need if you did not have users lined up before you started or got incremental feedback. If you couple all that with a perceived need to make money from the project when it is released, putting software out there can be a big source of looming stress -- especially if you begin to realize you are someone who loves to bake software and not someone who loves to run a software bakery.
My latest FOSS project took about a month of spare time -- porting to the web a CYOA-style interactive fiction Delphi app I co-wrote twenty years ago. And while I enjoyed working on it, I did drag the end out a bit and also consider even just not releasing the result just because I did not want to have a support burden from unpaid users. Luckily on that score it sank like a stone. :-) Thankfully I didn't need to make money from it. http://storyharp.com/
And at least that result is a big improvement from some previous independent projects which took much longer (sometimes years) and where hopes for making money from them were disappointed.