Frankly this
does seem like a massive barrier to me.
It's certainly causing me to lose interest, and I suspect it's driving away a lot of people, not least because it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place.
It was already off-putting not to be given a way to write sentences or record right away.
But now that I know, I have no interest in wasting time contributing to a UI translation I actively don't want to be subjected to, but would happily contribute recordings and sentences on occasion if the language was enabled because the potential for speech recognition and tts utility is entirely separate in value from UI.
This whole approach feels really backwards to me, and the really short list of languages no longer surprise me.
EDIT: I see I actually have had it bookmarked a long time, and presumably lost interest once before due to the lack of my language.
EDIT2: As much as the Norwegian UI is already annoying me and I've already spotted at least one spelling mistake in it, and one translation that is "correct" that thoroughly annoys me, I'll see if I can submit some sentences at least.