[palata]

> when you give up on an exotic repo today, is it because the setup is unclear, or because you’ve already decided it’s not worth the effort

Depending on a third-party adds risk. And when I depend on a third-party, I need to convince myself that I could either easily replace it or fork it and take over its maintenance. Because I am responsible for the software that I ship, and third parties are part of it.

If it has an exotic setup for no apparent reason, that's already a red flag. If they need to wrap a CMakeLists into a Makefile into a Python script into a shell script, maybe that is not the kind of software quality I want to depend on.

In other words, if I can't easily build the project, it's probably not good enough for me to depend on it.