[G3 Android Development] savoca:
I totally get where you're coming from, I really do. In fact not even a year ago I was pumping out kernels every week on the G2, with my only focus being a fat changelog and a massive defconfig (defconfig is where you enable or disable features before build). If there's anything I learned about kernel development and coding during my time spent being *that* kind of developer, it's this: Nothing.

Yes, I literally learned nothing at that time. More interestingly, that was the biggest exposure I had been getting as a developer. Each update I posted raked me in 30+ thanks and that felt absolutely awesome. You know what would feel awesome-er? If I had actually learned something valuable instead of sitting there being a thanks-whore. When you focus on enabling *all* the settings, and adding *all* the drivers, and making the *biggest* changelogs, you trade experience for limelight. People begin to think you're a genius for all the big fancy words in your changelog and praise your talent when you announce that you were able to copy and paste a file into your kernel source tree and flip a switch, but in reality - you learn nothing about developing. You run into problems you can't fix and requests you can't fulfill, and questions you just can't answer.

My biggest recent project was KCAL: http://xdaforums.com/android/software-hacking/dev-kcal-advanced-color-control-t3032080

KCAL took a collective 3+ months and hundreds of hours of work reversing and debugging highly vague (or nonexistent) documentation to develop. Had I stuck to being a changelog-whore, I wouldn't have even considered taking on KCAL. I'd still be waiting for some other dude to make it so I could cherry-pick and rake in the thanks.

Here's how many lines that made it into the final release of KCAL for both mdp5 and mdp3: 928

Here's how many lines it takes to enable a governor: 1

Yes, just one line to enable a governor, and there's absolutely zero development involved, no thought process, and no debugging. I'm not afraid to admit that 90% of the kernels on XDA all follow the 1-liner design. I'll admit that it's way easier than developing something like KCAL, and I used to be that kind of dev, and the reward was much much greater. People donate to you, buy your app, view your thread, and you get popular.

I'm pretty happy with my setup right now, actually. If I trade popularity and thread views/thanks for experience, then I pick up the ability to do what I want with my phone when I want, how I want. If there's an issue with the kernel, or a feature I want in the kernel, I can go at it 100% of the time. If I stick to being a 1-liner dev, then I have to wait for someone else to fix the issue for me, or create the feature, because I'd be spending all day flipping switches or adding compiler flags instead of learning something useful. So if this kernel lacks in features a little bit, it's because I'm busy learning and growing so that I can do great things later down the road, rather than continue doing the same things forever.

Sorry this went a little off the rails in regards to you, but I felt I needed to get that out and it's pretty relevant to how a lot of people view my design philosophy.