That's sort of it, innit? I, too, am tremendously frustrated by the common refrain of "well, it's open; learn to program and you can contribute." That's sort of like saying "If you don't like this album, learn to play all these instruments and write your own!"

If I need a word processor to do something, I'm not going to learn to program so I can contribute. I'm going to find one that does what I want (I'm a longtime beta tester for one of the Mac word processors). I haven't mucked about with linux in a long time (I'm a Mac user), but every time I install Ubuntu for a couple of days to play with it, I'm stunned at both how far it's come and how far it has to go.