I just don't understand why LDAP software has to generally be so unnecessarily complicated. I'm not talking about the protocol or the domain knowledge, i'm talking about implementations.

I've played with OpenLDAP and 389ds.

OpenLDAP is dumb in the sense that its own configuration is stored in OpenLDAP itself, so you need to know openldap to start learning openldap. And its community is quite toxic (i've seen people in their irc channel mocking users asking questions and giving out replies like "it's not in the official docs but it's in the codebase, you should have read the source code").

389ds... is barely documented. The official documentation often points to the proprietary counterpart from RedHat, but it's not clear what the open version corresponds to which proprietary version.

This is really a niche that could use some disrupting imho...