I find it appalling that the tools used are so sub standard
I don't actually find the tools "sub standard"... in fact, the tools are mind-blowingly awesome. As I said, I've used Zotero with LibreOffice and the power and sophistication in that environment is nothing short of astonishing for free software. It beats anything commercial I've ever tried. What seems to be the case is I'm operating (as I seem to often do... sigh) in the wilderness of software environments with what I'm doing at the moment. In such instances, it's not unsurprising to find bugs or at least rough edges all over. The way open source software works is that I (and you, and everyone) have access to the source code and can enhance and/or repair it if we are so inclined (or modify it in any way we see fit... and depending on the license, have to release our changes back into the free software community to let them reuse our artistry and skill).
Failing the ability to fix it (insufficient skill or time perhaps), the next best thing is generating a quality bug report or feature request. The value of testing and good feedback cannot be underestimated, and can make it much easier to continue the development of the software by the original developers and new developers that want to get involved. The key is that the people doing the work don't owe anyone else anything... they are working on the software because they feel like working on the software and will pick and choose what interests (or at least vexes) them. Etiquette demands a cautious and somewhat passive approach to requesting changes and fixes because many a promising or already amazing project has been abandoned because people using it were too demanding or inconsiderate (I have seen many a "hey dumbass why don't you fix your piece-of-shit software, I can't use it for what I want to do", and that doesn't help anyone).
Thus, my comment of "I need to figure out what I want to do about the BibTeX export functionality grumbles I have". Do I care enough to put in the effort to think about what The Right Thing™ is for addressing the usability problems that I had (others may feel very differently about it)? If so, am I prepared to engage in a public discussion and possibly even debate about the merits of various approaches? Will I have the time and skill to code and test a solution for others to test? Do I think the current package maintainers will welcome external changes? Does the main Zotero program need to be modified to properly support the changes? If so, is there a way of making the changes such that other packages can take advantage of a general framework for setting module parameters? Again, do I personally have the ability to put in that sort of time and effort? If I just makes changes for myself, it's just a few hours of work and I'm done. If I want to make changes to the supported free software packages, then I'm dealing with other humans all over the world and need to deal with all that entails. Maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad, heh. There's no way to tell before starting, of course. Alternately, I could just put my thoughts out there (there are usually "bug/feature tracking" repositories associated with most major projects that are used for that sort of thing) and hope that someone else already in that particular development community likes my ideas and runs with the changes themselves. Finally, I can just make the changes I think should be made and share them with the world, and people can use them or ignore them as they see fit (including the package maintainers). Given that others seemed to be having the same struggles as I did, just tossing stuff "out there" might be sufficiently helpful and have a lasting, positive, impact (that's more the "hacker" mentality).
Eric S. Raymond wrote what is considered the seminal work on how such an anarchy can, and does, work: The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
P.S. Now that I think about it, what I really, really want is an Emacs extension that interfaces with Zotero so I can include citations in my LaTeX documents as easily as I can do it in LibreOffice. It'd be pretty cool if there was a way or auto-exporting the BibTeX collection from Zotero without having to go through the Zotero user interface (Zotero's LibreOffice integration package handles building the bibliography automatically and dynamically based on the citations pulled into the document being worked on... which is pretty darned cool). See... more work ;).
Re: frickin BRAVO!
I find it appalling that the tools used are so sub standard
I don't actually find the tools "sub standard"... in fact, the tools are mind-blowingly awesome. As I said, I've used Zotero with LibreOffice and the power and sophistication in that environment is nothing short of astonishing for free software. It beats anything commercial I've ever tried. What seems to be the case is I'm operating (as I seem to often do... sigh) in the wilderness of software environments with what I'm doing at the moment. In such instances, it's not unsurprising to find bugs or at least rough edges all over. The way open source software works is that I (and you, and everyone) have access to the source code and can enhance and/or repair it if we are so inclined (or modify it in any way we see fit... and depending on the license, have to release our changes back into the free software community to let them reuse our artistry and skill).
Failing the ability to fix it (insufficient skill or time perhaps), the next best thing is generating a quality bug report or feature request. The value of testing and good feedback cannot be underestimated, and can make it much easier to continue the development of the software by the original developers and new developers that want to get involved. The key is that the people doing the work don't owe anyone else anything... they are working on the software because they feel like working on the software and will pick and choose what interests (or at least vexes) them. Etiquette demands a cautious and somewhat passive approach to requesting changes and fixes because many a promising or already amazing project has been abandoned because people using it were too demanding or inconsiderate (I have seen many a "hey dumbass why don't you fix your piece-of-shit software, I can't use it for what I want to do", and that doesn't help anyone).
Thus, my comment of "I need to figure out what I want to do about the BibTeX export functionality grumbles I have". Do I care enough to put in the effort to think about what The Right Thing™ is for addressing the usability problems that I had (others may feel very differently about it)? If so, am I prepared to engage in a public discussion and possibly even debate about the merits of various approaches? Will I have the time and skill to code and test a solution for others to test? Do I think the current package maintainers will welcome external changes? Does the main Zotero program need to be modified to properly support the changes? If so, is there a way of making the changes such that other packages can take advantage of a general framework for setting module parameters? Again, do I personally have the ability to put in that sort of time and effort? If I just makes changes for myself, it's just a few hours of work and I'm done. If I want to make changes to the supported free software packages, then I'm dealing with other humans all over the world and need to deal with all that entails. Maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad, heh. There's no way to tell before starting, of course. Alternately, I could just put my thoughts out there (there are usually "bug/feature tracking" repositories associated with most major projects that are used for that sort of thing) and hope that someone else already in that particular development community likes my ideas and runs with the changes themselves. Finally, I can just make the changes I think should be made and share them with the world, and people can use them or ignore them as they see fit (including the package maintainers). Given that others seemed to be having the same struggles as I did, just tossing stuff "out there" might be sufficiently helpful and have a lasting, positive, impact (that's more the "hacker" mentality).
Eric S. Raymond wrote what is considered the seminal work on how such an anarchy can, and does, work: The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
P.S. Now that I think about it, what I really, really want is an Emacs extension that interfaces with Zotero so I can include citations in my LaTeX documents as easily as I can do it in LibreOffice. It'd be pretty cool if there was a way or auto-exporting the BibTeX collection from Zotero without having to go through the Zotero user interface (Zotero's LibreOffice integration package handles building the bibliography automatically and dynamically based on the citations pulled into the document being worked on... which is pretty darned cool). See... more work ;).