[General Questions and Answers] FormerPalmOS:
In the ~15 months I've had a WM phone, I've learned four things:

1) The carriers are a key overlooked reason we have crap phones. Everyone wants to blame Microsoft, and while they put out some crappy stuff, let's face it - creating an operating system is a huge effort and Windows Mobile is pretty good when given the right hardware. Sure Apple has a way better GUI - competition is great. But my point is that my phone stock sucks because of the compromises Verizon forced HTC to make, not because of Windows Mobile. And Verizon and the other carriers take forever to test and approve OS releases or updates. This is for the protection of their technical support folks - they must have bulletproof stability since your average phone user has the IQ of a roofing nail. Your average smartphone user might be a bit brighter.

2) The "root" developers (maimach, ervius, bepe, cmonex, olipro, etc. - apologies to anyone left out) are the top of the food chain. None of this is possible without them. Whether it's an unlocker, IMGFS tools or kitchen, application launcher, rotation screen or whatever - these are the real pieces of inspiration. If I have only $5 to donate, that's where it goes.

3) The chefs out there are equally critical for the gap they bridge. I knew my phone could be better. But I had no clue how to make a custom ROM for WM, just knew from the PalmOS custom ROM days that conceptually it could be done. A couple different cooked ROMs (scrosler and lllboredlll at PPCGeeks) made it possible for me to take that step. Once I did I was hooked. Without chefs, I probably would not have made it to realization #4. But now there are too many chefs and most of them are more interested in having the newest stuff and not interested in having the most stable stuff. Show me a chef still cooking on the Touch Pro!

4) You need to learn to cook your own ROM. You need to learn everything you can about your device, the OS, the OEM applications, dependencies, registry keys, etc. If you are like me you will have your phone for two years. Chefs seem to move on after about 6 months. This is where XDA is an invaluable resource. HTCPedia may get some of the chefs and that's great. Having more chefs or chefs in two places may even get more people off of stock and into custom. That's great. These newly freed individuals will hopefully realize what I have realized and seek information and learn to make their own ROMs. And when they do they will come to XDA.

But in the end, sadly this is all about money and greed on the part of both the site owners and the chefs who agree to take money or phones or whatever from the site owners for whatever reason.

The XDA and HTCPedia sites both get their money from advertising. How much money is a function of clicks and visits. So the game is all about web stats for the site owners. So what drives those web stats?

I couldn't care less where I get the information I seek, but I am quite certain for the forseeable future I will most likely find what I need at XDA so I check there first. A noob looking to take that first step may be more likely to find it at HTCPedia if that's where more chefs end up. But I'll bet by the time someone like me has gone from noob to nerd cooking my own ROM I've generated 10,000x the clicks and visits of a noob, most of those to XDA.