@vvelox You're absolutely right.
That's why I write open source software in languages that are accessible to a large number of developers (JavaScript, PHP) rather than the ones cryptographers traditionally considered good (C, C++, C#, and recently Rust and Go).
If you don't meet people where they are, there's a 0% chance anyone will want to build on it.
Email became, for lack of a better word, gentrified by corporations. If you want adoption by the same players, you have to play their game. If you want them to fuck off, you have to outplay them.
Both are tall orders. But not impossible.