"Who wants to help me dive into that shit show of source code?"

I do!

I've never done any open source collaboration though. I'd like to get into it, but the on-ramps aren't totally obvious. I'm also not sure I have the requisite level of skill. I mean I can loop and test in a few languages, I know various tool chains and so forth, but I'm not sure how to leverage that into something helpful.

"...openly suppressing open source development..."
"...it utterly sucks."
"A few times I looked through bits of various code..."

I didn't know about any blatant suppression, but it lines up with my experience. For a while I did some hobby work on a java based application frontend for Steem. No browser, no servers, no funny business. It sounded great, and I was really motivated by being able to develop a tool for a social medium without any intellectual property nonsense. I found that documentation was scant, out of date, and largely unhelpful. Ultimately I've been basically frustrated out of that. I don't have the best track record of completing stuff though, so I can't blame it all on extrinsic factors.

Maybe if hive isn't awful I'll start up something similar there. It might be fun, but I'll have to find the time between writing a linux framebuffer graphics engine and image recognition AI training via evolutionary strategies.