I'd say the best contribution is they managed to build a mainstream commercial service on top of all of this!
Bogasse
Well, let's be polite and say it's not for everyone. TCB13 isn't the only person to really love this DE 😛
I don't get the enthousiasm either, there is always to much information for me on the screen and inconsistent UI all over the place 🤷
I really enjoy using systemd and wasn't an aware linux user before it started getting adopted, but you message really reads like a bad commercial 😅 "begin today your journey through..."
The wiki is what makes it really hard for me to move out. This masterpiece is where I learned 70% of what I know about linux systems 🤷
That's the best compromise for me but it still have some quirks too : the search function is still limited, gesture-only interactions is weird and a few features are missing like deleting posts, jumping to a comment from your notifications, ...
My experience with Linux is something like 4 years of Ubuntu then 8 years of Arch. What kept me in was stability (in the sense that I don't need to clean install every 6 months) and the wiki which allowed me to learn, a lot.
Although what I sometime don't enjoy, is the random maintenance burden : every now and then some package you rely on may change how it works (config format, cli interface). You can fix this later by keeping an outdated version but it will eventually need a bit of work. That's something I don't mind on my work computer, but on my personal one ... I just don't want more work coming at me when I get home and want to play games.