Fair point re: "someone has to start the project". I think Yugabyte is neat, and I want to invest in it as a platform, but I can't help but look at the project and feel like it's not set up for success should the Yugabyte the company fail. I hope I'm wrong and in 10 years it looks something like the Postgres community.

I also did eventually find the docs for building the database. It just feels odd to have a roadmap in the readme but no actual information for getting set up on development. It's one of those things (and I grant it's a very small thing) that makes me feel like the platform isn't really for the community.