Let’s try to lower the temperature folks. While evidently not everyone agrees, I would like to think that everyone is doing what she or he believes is most appropriate, and doing so with best intentions in mind.
While I have heard people periodically complain about different aspects of how Dune works, often these complaints are made in unstructured form in the middle of random threads in various forums. This makes it rather difficult to convert them into concrete suggestions and/or proposals for improvements. A more constructive way to go about it would be to open an issue in GitHub - ocaml/dune: A composable build system for OCaml. (and/or, even better still, engage with the dev team and propose a fix).
As far as I know (happy to be corrected) most of these “resources” (funding from Jane Street and Tarides) are and were channeled mostly to people working on the Dune “engine” (the backend, which is used inside Jane Street) and on the “package management” stuff. Contributors working on the “frontend” of Dune (the rules and the Dune language), which is what Dune means to most users are few and far between and are doing it mostly on their spare time these days (is my feeling).
It is a personal opinion. Dune was never designed with education in mind. In fact, Dune’s “engine” is industrial-grade and scales to extremely large codebases (like those found inside Jane Street).
Thanks for mentioning this. Despite what is sometimes claimed, Dune is superior to the build systems that existed before, at least in some important aspects. Just to mention some: high level of correctness, excellent backwards-compatibility story, rock-solid Windows support, scales to large codebases, etc. This does not mean of course that it is perfect (and based on user reports, usability is not where it should be), but it is a bit disingenous to claim that there aren’t technical reasons for the widespread uptake of Dune by the community.
Cheers,
Nicolas