Being free does not exempt a project from criticism. It's not like they were yelling about how terrible the project team was, just saying the issues they were having when trying to use it.
Agreed, but that’s not the point I’m making here. It’s not like this is some closed-source commercial product where the community can’t do anything about bugs/lack of features. My observation is simple: all of this time people spend complaining could be better spent helping to improve the project instead
Why can't people voice criticism and then work on the projects they want to work on instead of having homework and needing to learn the entire Jellyfin code base?
Nobody is personally insulting the devs as being lazy or incompetent. The devs can listen or not and they should have absolute control on what they implement and when. Its entirely reasonable that things they think are fine are pain points they don't realize exist because they've just gotten used to them. They also might not realize that some "wouldn't that be nice" thing they were thinking about implementing in the far future is actually something a lot of people want in the near term instead. There might also be things they just never even thought of.
The users of the software with criticism also aren't forced to use the software and should not be expected to implement anything they want unless they want to contribute. The project being open source ensures that in the future the project can be continued, if someone wants to continue it.
I do not disagree, there are horrible free projects with actively user-hostile documentation out there. But jellyfin is not that. Most criticism of it that I have heard falls either under a matter of taste ("I would do it differently"), a specific hardware setup not being supported or a skill issue during the installation which has more to do with administration of networks and Linux servers than with jellyfin.
And as a user of jellyfin myself I don't think these are particularly fair points of criticism.
Same thing that praise does. It's a discussion board, there's nothing wrong with people discussing the shortcomings of a project as well as its good points.