After reading the whole thread, I would like to start with an answer to the innitian question: Yes, it would be very nice if someone would produce more and up to date video content. And from a marketing perspective it is not optimal to have a version 4 on the market and a selection of videos featured at https://www.youtube.com/@_openHAB without even one video for this version. And as a new install after an unwanted upgrade gave me the chance to update my openHAB-appliance setup, which is now written down in detail, I really think about making a video tutorial for it.
But the bad numbers for openHAB shocked me, too and I question myself, if it is still worth investing more time in openHAB. This question has nothing to do with the technical quality of openHAB but simply with the future perspective. And this leads me to some aspects that have not been addressed yet it this thread.
I am not a developer and although I can understand some code, feeling comfortable with making some changes in examples I found on the internet and have a quite broad list of software I can use on a quite high level, openHAB always gives me the feeling of loosing more then learning more. The initial learning curve is not only steep but the number of things you have to learn (and then just use once for years) is so huge that I often have the feeling of loosing more than learning more. And new versions with new features and now obsolete things come faster than I have time to keep up.
And this means not only openHAB itself, but also the ecosystem arround when trying to find information/help in a concrete situation and the ease of use. The already discussed wizzard for a 1st start would be great for the beginners experience. But there is more:
I really appreciate the work that is done on documentation, but I miss tool tips for the fields of a mask like, what is the purpose of a field, examples (with explanation) of common inputs, … And I miss a more structured approach to find an item, … when I want to use it, like a grid with several searchable and sortable columns for more information than just the label (e.g. the thing it belongs to, the binding as already implemented in the overview, the location, the parent groups, …), more list boxes instead of free text for data known to the system already to avoid typo. E.G. when adding a new thing, item, … it would be so nice to have a chance to refer to the already existing items, … for naming conventions used. I so often find myself in a situation going back/opening an additional tab to look up things like this or getting wrong names by simply not remembering my own naming convention right (and yes renaming would be great!).
And as much as I seen how much time of some members of the forum they invest here (and I often needed and found great help here), the forum is a horror for me with threads of hundreds of postings starting back with a problem/new feature years ago over two versions with more outdated information then still usable content. And I do think that this is also a hurdle for beginners. Imagine someone wants to use the IP camera binding and sees this thread with 2860 postings, … And then there is Github, Reddit, we have the documentation, but with all the outdated information and hard to find “truth” for the actual version this can be quite frustrating.
And yes, I really would like to contribute in any way possible for me, but it starts with the complexity of the eco system. E.G. I made a widget for the Hanover AHA trash binding (no big thing) and wanted to offer it to the comunity, but for me it looked harder to do so than coding the widget, and so I kept it for myself. And whenever I read the documentation I would love to add a sentence here or there when I found a solution for my problem somewhere else, but the process is to complex for me. In Wikipedia there is this nice “Discussion” page behind every article. Would that be something for the openHAB-docs, too? Or links from the docs to special forum pages where such contributions could be made without any additional needed tools (and the knowledge how to use them) and accounts?
I see the need to broaden the user basis to keep openHAB alive and find new developers and advanced users to help these developers. Therefore we should make the start and also the “active life” with openHAB as comfortable as possible for those who are not already native Github-users, JAVA-developers, …