I am curious what you all think other people should work on? Either you don't have the time to work on yourself or other reasons. Perhaps it's not your area of expertise and you want someone else to fix it.
What do you want open source projects to support? What's your wants?
I'll tell you what I want.
I want complicated open source software that everyone depends on to be better documented. I spend random hours here and there digging into open source projects such as the Linux kernel, Nginx, Postgresql and haproxy but I cannot say I understand them fully. I need to do some documenting or articles on how they work.
I want LuaJIT to be documented enough so that someone could implement their own JIT tracing compiler by reading the documentation.
I strongly recommend the Rpython documentation. It's very good but I think it could be even more detailed.
I want a true scale to zero cloud infrastructure that is similar to Serverless but also scales to black Friday or Google levels of traffic. And has scalable data layer similar to Instagram or Twitter's gizzard. I want scaling plan function that turns money into scalbility.
I am curious what the HN community desires are. Not necessarily your problems but I am sure there is some overlap.
It's gradually changing, but the publishing companies make an extraordinary amount of money by acting as a bogus distribution system. They've managed to sit between academics and readers and charge both sides for doing nothing.
That being said, this isn't so much a tooling problem as a social one..