This is seriously your argument? The average user should not be here. That is just a reality.
People can certainly hire mechanics to ‘fix their car’ and buy their food at the grocery store. They can also buy software that does home automation.
It is time for you to put things in perspective instead of this ‘pie in the sky’ thinking that everyone is equal. But, only in the realm of being able to use this software.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare using free HA to a paid-for car or paid-for food, just as no-one should compare hitching a free lift to buying a first-class ticket.
If a car was free, I’m pretty sure you would have to learn how to maintain it yourself.
The only free food I am aware of is that you grow/rear yourself and you have to know how to process that as well.
People are constantly exhorted [your word] to learn programming and fix code because HA is free and volunteer-based so there is an expectation of “chipping in”. One doesn’t have to fix code - I’ve personally never felt pressured to do so - but then one’s expectations should align to that.
…I’m not trying to start an argument and will delete this post if people think it’s inflammatory.
[edited for typos]
Please don’t delete it.
In fact, I just preserved it in case you decide to delete it.
No, no, just answer here. 
The other topic is related to an error/issue, and it should stay like that. Otherwise it will be hard to read and find informations about the issue itself.
So, what is it, that you’re disagreeing on?
I am appreciative of the help (or I try to be here, sometimes hard to keep my sarcasm in check) on the HA forums. This is coming from someone who is a non-programmer. I will say certain things do cause a certain degree of frustration. I can give one example relating to NUT. In a prior posting I mention not being able to see a sensor for a s/n and the diags from the integration show it. It is also shown on my Pi NUT is running on. Oversight or bug? Not sure. But I like HA enough to keep using it. Would be helpful to know if there is a specific forum for an integration or when the next release is due. Github? Maybe, not sure.
Either way I appreciate help when I get it.
Serial numbers are typically not provided as sensors in HA across the board. It’s not an oversite, it’s something that doesn’t change, therefore it doesn’t need an entity nor does it need to crowd your database with static information.
If you want to display it on the dashboard, you can make an template entity or use a template in the frontend.
{{ device_attr('sensor.cyberpower_status', 'manufacturer') }}
{{ device_attr('sensor.cyberpower_status', 'model') }}
Understood. Just weird the diag data included the s/n as part of entity id. There are other nut sensors to me that seem like they never change, but point taken. If I ever had to call in for support it helps with the info readily available in nut. Alternative is getting on my knees and possibly flipping it over to get the info.
Short of inquiring here I would like to stay in the know when the next integration release for nut is coming. How can I stay informed on this or any other particular integration?
Seriously?
There are - what? - a million installations. Only a small proportion of those visit the forum looking for help. I doubt if the others have given up and moved on to a commercial product. They just use HA as is - and it works.
To develop your analogy… most of the people on the forum are kids trying to turn their VW Beetles into hot rods. Of course things go wrong. 
The nut integration is part of home assistant and maintained by 3 volunteers. You’d watch the release notes for NUT integration changes. If you’re using the NUT addon, then you’d watch the custom integration repo for NUT because that addon is not a core addon.
If you’re missing sensors that you think should be there, then make a Feature Requests.
I think that’s a valid point. A lot of issues pop up because a lot of folks are trying to do more with HA than the average bear.
It would be interesting to see the metrics on the topics to know where people tend to ask the most questions. For instance, anecdotally, I want to say maybe 10% of posts are about ESPHome and if you are coding up ESPHome you are probably a bit more likely to be here because there is enough complexity that the docs just may not cover. I would say that most people deploying ESPHome are the hot rodders. It would be very interesting to know how many are about ESPHome.
If you take that through all the topics, I bet you would see something like 80% of the posts are the hot rod users and 20% are people that are totally lost because HA is too complicated for them. And if that 100% represents just 5% of all HA users in total, it’s quite telling.
I’m not making an argument here, just saying it would be interesting metrics to know - and ones that will likely always be anecdotal since it would be a massive task to actually calculate these metrics unless major changes were made to the forum to help with their collection.
I didn’t mean to offend.
I have no idea how many people are using HA. I look at my freinds and family who are mostly pretty intelligent people. All would be ‘normal’ users. And, I don’t believe any of them could use HA.
If I look back over the years at people I have worked with, I could confidently say there are three that could run HA. And, they certainly are not ‘normal’ users.
And in addition to that, you shouldn’t forget about the language barrier.
There are a lot of people using HA, that don’t speak english! Eg. my mother in law would never even think about looking something up here, as she wouldn’t even get here or know of the existence of this forum at all, without english search phrases… 
It’s 2024, and people still haven’t learned, that their point of view is not the only valid one. But that is not HA specific. Look around the world - in many places idiots are running the governments, because people are easy to manipulate and think, their POV is the valid one… Me, me, me - everything is mine, I earned it, or better, others earned it, but it should be mine either way…
I remember a topic from a few days ago, where someone asked a really dumb question, I answered not very friendly (no, not sorry about that), and the next thing, I’m anti american (didn’t even know he was a maga). No, I’m not! I’m anti moron, and I don’t care if black, white, green or dotted blue. I neither care for race or religion, but what I do care about is the attitude these people think they can have. Their POV is not the only one, despite populist politicians or helicopter parents telling them.
And it’s the same here: I want that fixed, it’s important for me, I must have that. And I learned, if I only scream loud enough, some idiot will take care of it. Works in politics, why not here?
Most of the feature requests are the same: HA is bad, it doesn’t have this or that, I need that. Period.
If others need this, or if it is even slightly valuable for at least 1% of the users, doesn’t matter, I need it, I want to have it, do it.
I see hard times coming up for these people, history won’t be kind to them and at the end of the day, they are even more disillusioned, because they are left behind. But instead of what the get to hear, it is simply because of their attitude and unwillingness to accept, there are other views as well…
I’d also presume that some maintainers define different levels of sensitivity around certain bits of data. For example, ESPhome has a field for the MAC address in the device details, but it shows as redacted when downloading diagnostics. On the flip side, the Ubiquiti integration has the MAC address proudly displayed on the device page.
As others have alluded to, HA is free and is 99.5% dependent on volunteers. Yes, there are a handful of Nabu employees who do it full time. Volunteers have many priorities - like working a paying job, raising kids, skiing, Yeah, it’s not a perfect setup - but nothing is - it does have the advantage of being free and if you really want to change it - you can. Since it’s a community it gets better when more people chip in. There are plenty of ways chip in and make it better
a) install and test the betas on your devices.
b) provide support in the forums on the areas you have knowledge
c) update the docs with missing or correcting bad information
d) review bug reports to help filter out bad reports or make sure there is sufficient info to make it accurate and actionable
e) get involved in the architectural discussion to help drive the direction
f) buy a coffee for a volunteer who fixes a bug or provides an integration / custom integration you use.
You didn’t. 
I just think we underestimate other people. Anyone who can set up a Raspberry Pi (by following instructions, not necessarily by understanding them) should be able to run HA successfully, and that’s more people than you’d expect. I read the other day that RPi are going public - the story mentioned that they’d sold 60M of them.
But yes, I know several people who wouldn’t know where to start. 
I own quite a few of those. Just Saying!
Yes - six of them are mine…
There’s some very limited stats here:
About - Home Assistant Community.
40K active users in the last 30 days, apparently.
And that is exactly why I wanted to keep that issue there.
However I note that hasn’t stopped you diverting this topic into philosophy (where oddly you seem to be echoing my point) and politics
Totally. I personally don’t consider myself a whiz-kid coder, so I try to help in other areas. It should not be necessary to do coding to contribute as you initially stated.
I am amused to see how my plea for developers to keep an eye out for issues related to their code, and respond to them - even if only to say “no” - has evolved into support for two specific bugs, philosophy of human nature and of FOSS projects, and even into Raspberry Pi’s business model. Anyone want to try religion ? 