...As a community, we need developers. People to back the work of Paul, David, the folks at BWW, etc. The very first thing new developers want is a friendly development environment.
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There should be a single 'awesome ArcaOS' git(Hub,lab) with everything you need to get up to speed with a tested stable development kit. That means OpenWatcom 1.9 and gccand all the environment scripts sorted out and standardized, a modern editor... and I know someone can take a few hours to set up by themselves. Bullshit. It's just yack shaving and non-productive.
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But I tell you the developer experience is currently very opaque, cumbersome and error-prone.
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You have captured what has been the Achilles Heel of trying to get any DEV work done on our platform.
The old stuff (say VAC 3.08/3.65/4.0) has been largely abandoned (although it also seems like equally undeserved treatment), while the newer stuff (say latest GCC, etc.) isn't spelled out anywhere as to how it maps onto our OS/2 platform. I'm talking here stuff like: how does the IBM OS/2 Dev Toolkit mix with the generic GCC stuff? Should one keep these separate, or combined? How is RPM part of all this?
In summary: we have a minefield of a DEV environment! Who wants to take a trip through that when the "skull and crossbones" warning sign is staring you right in the face? Yeah...those who enjoy doing that sort of a thing (me included), but it makes for an insurmountable obstacle for everyone else.
Beyond this...even with all the right tools, etc, etc. being available, you still need someone to lend you that "helping hand". We get this here on the forum, but what would go extremely far would be having an 'OS/2 Dev Class' organized, where on let's say weekly basis we would all do an on-line session to plug away through some coding examples...basically, a modern-day on-line course!!!
This could tackle things like:
1) What IDE environments are available?
2) What compiler/library/runtime environments are availble?
3) What are the basic pre-reqs one must acquire before coming to the "big boys" table, that being: get some basic C/C++ experience, understand OS/2 pecularities such as "..xxx..."
4) Sample Project
5) Sample Project Debugging
6) ...you get the idea?
So until that happens we simply will not develop any extra DEV "bench strength", which will eventually kill the platform.