[General Topics] drakonizer:
I get the feeling that you want the entire community to evolve and that is a very good thing. You have raised very important points, but here are their flaws, in your own order:

1) There's pretty much nothing that can be done about that. Anything aftermarket, whether it's software, hardware, automobile parts etc, require a fair deal of research on the end of the user. That said, things have become much easier now that what it was 4 years ago (from my experience), which is surprisingly good, but was never expected. Even if the entire process could theoretically made simpler, that would just bring a huge crowd of inexperienced users who have not done research into the userbase. These users will not be able to deal with the many annoyances that come with using custom firmware.

2) Official builds by reputed ROMs are usually never abandoned, because they are built on a server, on a regular basis. Even if the maintainer stops updating the device tree, the device can still get updates with ROM level changes. However, since there are an insane number of ROMs with different names, there are ones that have official builds manually built by a human, which results in infrequent builds. XDA *could* think of enforcing certain standards to get the OFFICIAL tag, like a minimum of monthly updates.

3/4/5) This is where I almost completely disagree with you. Let me start off by saying that I do agree with you on the fact that good communication is important, and that is something that most developers (including me) can improve on.

That said, here's the problem, and I can only speak for myself here. When you're using custom firmware, you gain something, and you lose something. The rise in number of ROMs and supported devices has made people compare custom ROMs to OEM releases. You pay the OEMs for not only your hardware, but also for the software. They have access to proprietary code that makes their jobs so much easier. Custom ROMs, especially bring ups from scratch, require a LOT of time and effort. For example, I have a relatively high powerful laptop (Alienware 15 with i7-6820HK and 16GB RAM) and it takes me ~6hrs to build an oreo based ROM from scratch. While there are developers with access to better servers and equipment, a majority do not. Considering this build time, imagine how much time and effort it takes to debug each small change. Changes in life are not usually predictable, and I may start a project with a particular timeline in mind, and something may come up that makes me unable to meet that. Developers are not trying to "attract users" with their ROMs. They are sharing their work, which they made in their free time and making them accountable is very unfair. What you can do is follow a thread, see the frequency of updates and decide whether you want to use it or not. Also, most ROM releases (not sure about poor communities like Xiaomi and stuff) are usable independently, even without updates.

Custom ROM flashing methods are much riskier and more complicated than an OEM's process. 99% of all ROM releases are tested by the developer and works on their end. Imagine making a non-paid developer responsible for something that's most probably a user error. Even with official builds, the process remains the same. So no, accountability will never be a thing. The point of the disclaimer to keep those in doubt (these are the same people who are likely to screw up) away.