But the UX of everything Free is just horribly bad. I've written a toy softsynth for myself in Ruby and was looking for some MIDI editing software that I could use to quickly throw some notes in a piano roll and draw some curves for various CCs, and export to a .mid. But everything was incredibly cumbersome. Of the several I tried, only Ardour even allowed the control of arbitrary CCs, and I had to dig to find it, and it wanted to create an entire directory hierarchy before I could even draw a single note.
If there was going to be a Free revolution of people donating and volunteering to overthrow the proprietary software world, it would have happened a long time ago. Free software has an insurmountable design, development, and discovery problem.
If I were looking to start a community today, and actually have people join it, I'd go where the people are, and that is Discord.