Free As In "Puppy", Not Free As In "Beer" - Bringing Down the Cost of Free Privacy Software

Standardization of language
This results in latency and energy being spent trying to understand things that could potentially be mapped to something else in a way that makes it more recognizable. Where can we share glossaries? This is also a barrier to localization efforts and success. Get a jargon jar. How much of the onboarding is using jargon? This is also confusing and takes extra time for users to navigate - or not.

Mapping to real world issues is not always accurate or considerate of nuances.
Stress tests may not happen much or at all to see where onboarding and UX, or the tool itself is successful or needs refinement in its adoption journey.

Feedback loops are lateral
Often the feedback we get is a call that is coming from inside the house. There is some sort of bias, often assumed knowledge that can over time throttle growth and in the worst case lead to incumbency and gate keeping by accident. It also hurts adoption and outreach outside of the loop.

Not everyone can use FOSS options, not everyone has the time or funds to spend learning hardware or integrations in a FOSS privacy stack. A few years ago while working with a consultant in MENA, a person who was volunteering to give feedback on an issue we were discussing lectured her about not using GPG. She messaged me and was confused as to why they would even think that it was needed and was worried that she had done something wrong. No, she did nothing wrong - the person who imposed their own ideals and standards did and it was damaging and embarrassing. This costs contributors.

Maintainers resources are scattered or not maintained
Often these are shared from a personal repo. Some are not updated, leading to documentation rot. Maintainers often do not have the time to even think about their documentation, and sadly funding still favours code over sustainability measures like funding documentation that could lead to onboarding future maintainers and prevent bus factor through accessibility.

So much energy is spent trying to find the right onramp to what you need
Not all projects have the resources in place to actively engage as many different inputs as they could. This inhibits feedback that could be helpful for developers, and outreach to find out what people think about what you are building. Return to section about lateral feedback loops.

If you need to write more user documentation, your UX needs fixing

No, I am not taking time to read docs or build it from source.

Create with existing standards in mind and for popular OS's

Please do this, especially if what you are doing touches human rights.