[OnePlus 3 Guides, News, & Discussion] theduke7:
oh man, i don't mean to make this an argument...but again looking for ways to improve our experience is one thing and just complaining is another.

before i go any further let me quote the exact posts you linked

1-

key words here are obvious, No Interest In Open Sourcing the Camera Stack.

so a year ago OP was clear that they will NOT open source their stack, and as a for-profit company they have all the rights to not do so, it's not just because no one else is doing so, it's because they'll then stop releasing phones, their product cycle will 3-5 years with the great specs they provide , a device with the latest SoC 6 GB ram , now open source your drivers stack, why would anyone by another device from them, why even release a new one!! but most importantly, why develop an OS, they just release an empty clean device and put the stacks online and users find a way to either compile their own or wait for custom roms and flash them accordingly...while few will actually like that (me included) most people wont, most complains on OP forums are from users with locked bootloader, they don't even know custom roms exist,and those are the ones who make OP profit, those are the ones that buy new devices.

would i like it if they released the stack, sure , most people like us would, but it's NEVER going to happen , it's not complaining at this point it's wishful thinking, it'll be like OP shooting itself on the foot, the day they open source specific parts of their driver stacks their profit margin will be cut in half (if not worse)...

and they did say this in the 2nd link you provided

so again they were clear, the entire industry is not doing it (including the Google the actual owner of the OS), no one not even those who modded this cam have any access to google camera stack .

this leads to my final point, make no mistake, OnePlus hands down is behind Google devices is the most developer friendly OEM out there, there's no competition , they open source their OS, their Kernel both Stable and Beta, their Camera blobs, and much more, they created a device that they encourage you to unlock it's bootloader and not lose your warranty, on their official forums you find Tuts on how to do almost anything, they;'re aware of the real dev community and they award it by giving devs (with proven track record) not only access to their alpha and closed beta program,s , but also they award them new devices to encourage Development ...

It's not their fault then, the weigh of reaching a better experience is partially one for devs, and most of them carry that weight and do provide us with great experiences given the limited resources independent have...

Way before they release the blob SultanXDA provided a great camera experience on his CM (them Lineage) roms and to this day he improves upon his work not only on the camera, The now abandoned PAEX provided fantastic camera and was for a while the only rom with Internal Hal switch that doesn't require flashing and reboot,

then came AOSPA , they created their own stack, their own hal to create an entirely different camera experience and process than OOS, and it's Opens sourced so even when plus stops it's support we'll have an open source Camera HAL that can be used by other roms (as it's already)...and they were able to do so because of how OP is Dev friendly (not the other way around) because such HAL is specific to our device and no other.

so, i stand my point m8, we can be grateful for devs who improve our experience, but there is no reason what so ever to keep blaming OP for anything, because they can easily (as mentioned on the carl quote above from the link you provided) , it's not industry standard, and they can easily just drop the pen source thing, they can keep attracting specific devs and give them access to some sort of closed beta and users just get the final result , they can void your warranty with unlocking bootloader ...how many users will they lose? the few hundreds here on XDA?

even the users of Xiaomi devices that this Gcam mod was originally created for don't complain this much about their way less impressive devices, they're actually very proud of their devices that specs wise not even close the 3/3T .

just to repeat myself, i really don't mean to make this an unpleasant argument, and i hope you don't see any disrespect in anything i wrote, it's just strange to me how we OP users are complaining more than users of other devices that don't even have 5% of the community we have, and with device way less impressive than ours, our device is even better than the new iPhoneX (imho by miles), and it's last years version.