Although I understand the OP's perspective open-source is a community effort and people should have a more proactive attitude and contribute when they feel things aren't okay. Most open-source developers aren't focused / don't have time for how things look (or at least not on the beginning). If you're a regular user and you can spend an hour taking a bunch of screenshots and improving a readme you'll be making more for the future the project that you might think.

As both user and developer - user CAN contribute but the developer/maintainer SHOULD add the screenshots.

This mentality explains a lot of open source.

If the app sucks, few people will add the screenshots. Therefore, most apps without screenshots will suck. So new apps will need the developer to add screenshots, or people will assume it sucks.

And we're back to square one. The developer has extra responsibility to highlight the features.

This. It should be the most sane configuration and fit most use cases and lead to an experience working out of the box.

There's a real problem here with backwards compatibility. If you add an option for something, it makes sense to make the default match the functionality of old versions, even if it's not the best for general use cases. That way any tools built on top of it can safely update.

Foreplay is important! Gotta get me excited for that app.

A lot of documentation is like that.

Its terrible when the software is called some random word that has nothing to do with the programs functionality

To be that dick, a headless component library is still meant to do something, show an example of it being used!

If you've written a "usage" section that showcases more than one uselessly simple example that doesn't even work in the project's current state, you're already far ahead of the average.

Even for a CLI tool, there should be a real world example showing how it works and what the output looks like. Eg, for jq:

$ cat file.json
{"field: "value"}
$ jq '.field' file.json
"value"

And a few other examples.

It scroobles obviously!

TODO

Including the documentation link, which only has incomplete getting started section

I wish there was a way to give more props to open-source repos that do this.

I already star the project. But I'd love to say "Thanks for making a demo page it really helped!"

I imagine most single developer projects lack any design or UX so the screenshot would do little to encourage users to download.