What was this thread about already?
I can't recall if it was about genetically engineered mushrooms or the Amiga homebrew scene anymore.
Seriously though, I wonder if the existence of the RKMs has not had a negative effect on the Amiga scene. It certainly allowed young tinkerers and enthusiasts to dig into the entrails of the beast but it also kept non-experts coders adults at bay: if you do not know what programming is about and how memory mapped hardware works then these piles of expert knowledge are pretty intimidating.
Compare with the Amstrad scene where you have this
very nice wiki with lots of code samples, or even what exists for the Oric with the
Oric SDK from debug@DefenceForce.
A complete off-the-shelf turn-key solution for Amiga development did not exist until a few months ago when Hannibal released his (
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65625) so it is no wonder that many attempts start with AMOS and BlitzBasic and do not go much further. (I am not saying these are useless, far from it, just a far cry from what is needed.).
Also his toolchain is Windows only for now so that also limits the pool of candidate users (I'm working on a similar one for OS X).
Remember the saying: "be the change you want to see in the world".
Unless we all start contributing something (like Hannibal did) things are not going to change. Recruiting non-Amiga natives is also crucial for long term survival but that can only happen if the tools match what they know on modern systems. Newcomers are fine with constraints on what you can do on the _target_ machine, but they will not accept constraints on the tools.
The problem of the Amiga community is too many consumers, not enough software producers.
. There are very good producers, StingRay, Galhahad, Phx, etc. but we need more and new tools.