yes, quite a few hoops to jump through to get something working.

Back in the day, I went through massive effort to jailbreak my iPhone, void the warranty, and use the Cydia app store (amazing that this whole community operated for free).

But slowly the vanilla iPhone experience got good enough that I didn't need to jailbreak anymore, or at least it wasn't worth the effort. And the community died down as well.

Interesting to see the resurgence of a similar concept.