As one of the original Chef contributors before Opscode, and then becoming one of the lead people working with the open source community for Opscode, the vitality of the open source Chef project is very important to me. However, Opscode's support for all of our open source projects also hinges on the company being successful enough to continue to do so. Thus, a balance must be struck.
Opscode doesn't respond to every ticket on that open source tracker, just like we don't write all of the code in the open source project. I personally try to at least see every issue, but with over 1.8 million installs of the Chef gem alone, there are a lot of users out there. If you want a guaranteed response, we do have various paid support plans which will provide you with that, but it doesn't come for free because we have to pay the people who research and write those responses.
There are multiple ways to install the Chef 10 Server and many ways to start the processes. We have tried to support the most popular, and I think most people have found success. We're proud that we can do things like release our rewrite of the Chef Server in erlang back to open source. We want it to be easy for people to use Chef. We initially wrote it to make our lives easier, and we want your lives to be easier too. That's why the Chef 11 Server ships in our Omnibus packaging, which provides a running Chef Server in three commands or less.