> almost everything I've ever worked with that was run by the Apache foundation turned out to be semi-abandoned disasterware over time
Can you name a few examples?
Can you name a few examples?
https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?name
These are all projects that once were (more) relevant, however seem to have become rather niche (Gradle, Jetbrains/VSCode, GoogleDocs/Libreoffice e.g. for the first three are the dominant competitors).
Most of these projects (like the massive commons listings) are either used by some Java library somewhere (meaning their success/relevance is tied to the usage of Java), or are obscure enough that they are no longer used widely and so suffer from lack of interest.
There are gems in this list, to be sure, but if you just run into half-maintained projects all the time you're not likely to associate good things with the Apache name?
OpenOffice is probably the most famous (it still has the name, but it is dead, LibreOffice is the real "active" fork).
And the things in the "Attic" are officially dead - https://projects.apache.org/committee.html?attic and many more projects should be there.
Lots of other projects just die silently and/or you are unsure of the status.
Here you at least have a chance to revive them if you like as there is always an overarching organisation.
More things should move into the Attic, like OpenOffice.