[mathiaspoint]

Network affects come from people building on extra stuff. There's no special sauce with these models, as long as you have an inference endpoint you can recreate anything yourself with any of the models.

As to the nailgun thing, that's an interesting analogy, I'm actually building my own house right now entirely with hand tools, it's on track to finish in 1/5 the time some of this mcmansions do with 1/100th of the cost because I'm building what I actually need and not screwing around with stuff for business reasons. I think you'll find software projects are more similar to that than you'd expect.