I have only recently become part of the community and I am fortunate to have experience as an accountant, a software developer, business consultant and also a business owner. So I can understand and relate to what @bkm and @rmehta are saying and honestly you are both right from your own perspectives! I know that’s a bit of a paradox but hear me out.
As things currently stand in the current evolution of ERPNext, my personal opinion is that we are in a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
Frappe as the core maintainers have built ~90% of the product and are understandably frustrated and struggling to keep up with the continous demands of the community. It is clearly unfair to expect them to bear most of the load if this product is to be made world class. Unfortunately, having built 90% of the product, 90% of the knowledge is also stuck with Frappe!
The community on the other hand I strongly believe contains its fair share of people who WANT to help and contribute in the true spirit of open source (there will always be the freeloaders who take without giving back but they will always exist). However 2 big barriers to this are 1) Speed of development by Frappe where versions are being updated a few times each month and 2) the limited nature and quality of the documentation. There is a whole thread dedicated to a bunch of people who want to understand better how things work under the hood and are willing to pay for this!
Unfortunately the current status is a stalemate where neither party is incentivised to make a change for the better. This is frustrating for me to see, because clearly this product has potential to be something amazing and not living up to it because of this will be a tragedy.
As of now, the way out I can see is to make the project MORE developer / community friendly by lowering the barriers to contribute, both in terms of version stability as well as documentation quality. Unfortunately at this time, this can only be done by Frappe due to most of the knowledge and control of the project being with them. This will be more work in the short term, but in the longer term, I believe it will move things towards what you have in mind, where the community builds and contributes it’s fair share to the project.
@rmehta - I want Frappe figure this out and would love to help if possible. I’m located in Mumbai so please let me know if you would like to catch up and have a conversation about this.