@Marcus_Wolschon you miss the point you gave up. So you don’t even know a collage or an friend who could of helped you. And did you document any of your builds and post them. As if you didn’t you are just as bad as the system you complain about. I’m building a CNC soon I will not document it, as there are plenty of resource sites that tell you how to do it. Does that make me a poor builder. But my electronic skills are poor but I’m improving them by building and researching. Like I say you want a single resource site you build it and maintain it in the way you want and then you have no complaints.
I don’t think the project has a maintainer. I don’t think Adrian really wanted that role, nor has he tried to step in as someone who makes yes or no calls about what’s included.
I think the real strength of the reprap project is the community. You can’t get really far without going to a forum or chat, and that (IMO) is a good thing.
@Marcus_Wolschon , if you’re frustrated by lack of documentation, you’re certainly welcome to start acting as that maintainer. I think the reality is simply that we’re more interested in printing than we are in writing about it.
@Marcus_Wolschon - usually, the job of “Maintainer” goes to the one who complains the most about the lack of one. I think you’re in the running as a top candidate. Not willing to do it? Then really, I think you’re not being very reasonable. Complaining about others not providing something which you freely admit is very time consuming (“a full time job”) and not being willing to do it yourself… well, not exactly sympathy inspiring…
@Marcus_Wolschon Honestly, have you ever worked on any open source projects where all the data was at a single point. Think of the business world. Small companies that don’t have all the paperwork get things done quicker, but there is less oversight and less documentation. Large companies can track every dime spent, but they take forever and innovation dies.
Look into Android AOSP. I will challenge you to find even a single forum website (let alone forum area) that has all the information. What you’ll find is a few kind souls who sticky a post with all the helpful links they could find, but hese gradually go obsolete.
For that matter, let’s not restrict this analogy to open source. If you were to research… let’s say collets for milling machines. Tell me a single place where you can find information. Okay, you’ll say the same thing we say, you’ll just need to google it and sift through many forums.
If you’re not comfortable with endless researching, then you will only discover information that is obvious. Honestly, I’m floored by the quickness that people answer questions with her, and for the most part it is truly friendly advice, while still having constructive criticism. You won’t find that in the AOSP project forums.
Like others have said, you sound like you are very knowledgeable on how data should be organized, and I assure you any website would welcome depositories of knowledge.
If you do decide to start a project like that, please be sure to post here so I can bookmark 
I found that open source equates to “if you want something done, you have to do it yourself.” people have different goals and mostly don’t share information because they don’t have it, don’t know where to get it, or simply think that it’s not important to share.
I found the selection of controller boards lacking, so I created teensylu. I was disappointed with the prusa i2, so I modified 90% of the parts.
I posted what I could, documented when I had the time, and let it loose into the wild. I know there are bugs and issues, however I haven’t had time to fix them. Thats open source. Contribute if you want it to be better.
a site which compared hotends would be very useful, but expensive and time consuming for the person doing it. who’s going to pay for that? would the maintainer of that particular side of it include how easy/hard it is to make that particular hotend from scratch? how would the results be scored?
You people send me hot ends, I’ll categorize them. =D (j/k of course, but I would if I could)
Isn’t that how reviews work in IT (aka. free stuff for the reviewer)?
But the person giving away “free stuff” has to see enough of a benefit in it to do it in the first place.
I think the hotends get pretty well reviewed in this forum IMHO. I’m pretty convinced that I’ll replace my cruddy j-head ripoff with either a true j-head or an E-3D hotend based everyone’s comments and the fact that I want to support @Sanjay_Mortimer , as he’s quite a contributer to the community and his input has helped me along the way
also the ‘reprap’ goal has become a little… fragmented? defused? over the past two or three years, with printers designed more for ease of use, and quality of print output at the expense of percentage of the whole being printable. the only exception I can think of currently might be the reprap Wally.
The original reprap goal is poor. Do you want a 3d printer for the sake of having one? Or do you want a 3d printer that is easily sourced, easy to assemble, easy to calibrate, and reliable.
I have long held the belief of using cheap and accessible components (usually locally sourced) over complicated designs and low reliability. I switched to lasercut sides, which could just as easily be made with some plywood and a drill. These 2 pieces replaced 6 vitamins and solved many problems I had with rigidity and alignment.
I disagree that the overall goal itself is poor. I would agree that the technology is no where near there yet. I don’t think the branching off to get better quality is necessarily a bad thing. I think the community as a whole has learned a lot in doing so.
But could it have learned significantly more without the branching?
@Marcus_Wolschon but, with a monolithic development, would we have made it to where 3D printing is today? Would we have created all that knowledge at all, that might now only be hard to find?
I don’t think the reprap project would be nearly where it is today without the branching. We’d have some decent darwins though.
I don’t believe so @Marcus_Wolschon . Think is, people study/research/try new stuff in a sometimes narrow field that interests them, sometimes this can be off on a tangent but later on pays back in an possibly unforeseeable way.
@Jonathan_se5a_Sorens trying different variables is exactly what the scientific method prescribes. Without taking risks with experimentation, there is no progress. I think that progressing home 3d printing was the ultimate goal of the project, democratizing 3d printing was the means to the end. Or possibly, progress and improvements in design could be a means to further democratization. We now have better cheaper printers, and were getting closer to bring able to 3d print for the masses. So they’re both the ultimate goals I suppose.
@Marcus_Wolschon if you don’t tinker you don’t learn.
In industry I work on auto lathes, I tinkered and experimented and reduced cost by 70% and increase accuracy of the parts by 30% even though I was told by the machine manufacturers pros it was impossible.
That’s what the 3d printing community is doing, but sooner or later those fragments clear the way for decent machines. Its called evolution, your idea is called stagnant development.
It’s called efficiency and effectivity.