Eh. I dunno. How bout Firefox. Everybody uses it. It's open source. Yet it's growing like crazy.
No. Not everybody uses it. A lot of people still use IE, since it ships with Windows and recently got functionality that rivals Firefox for the simple user. I use Opera and I'm certainly not the only one. Then there's still Safari, Konqueror, etc. You probably didn't hear of a lot of software but that doesn't mean 'everyone' uses what you use.
Anyway, why do you keep insisting on separate hosting? It works fine the way it is now and frankly, to get CHDK I don't need to wait anywhere. I can either just checkout the source or download a binary from GrAnd. I do agree that the zshare 1-minute wait is annoying, but it's only that. It's not like you need to use it several times a day.. and it's just one minute. If we really need a place to host stuff, there's GrAnd's hosting, I have 4GB at my university, acseven might be able to help... enough possibilities here. Again, putting it all in one package can only cause trouble, especially if you don't want to spend any money on it. This project may be free but webhosters want to earn money regardless of what you're hosting. (Also, it might be useful to notice that all "Unlimited bandwidth/storage" packages are cheap, whereas business/enterprise hosting with SLAs etc is expensive. There are no expensive "unlimited" packages, because nobody wants to guarantee unlimited use. Really, don't try to move big projects to ultra-cheap hosting.)
As for 'n00bs'... why do they *need* CHDK? I don't think anyone would install CHDK 'for the fun of it', to do nothing useful with it. My opinion: if someone feels that he/she 'needs' it, he/she will have to put some effort into it. Why else would you consider yourself a power-user?
Properly reading the FAQ/manual is the key to actually understanding what CHDK does and why it does things... and it limits the chances of user error. People already spent a lot of time in writing documentation. Sure, it can be shortened in some cases, but this should definitely not be done to generalize 'for all models'. As you've proven in your small tutorial/video, you easily miss things, especially if you don't look at it from the developer's point of view.
I personally think the documentation is quite understandable and should allow anyone to install CHDK on his own in under an hour. People tend to rush into things, half an hour isn't 'too long'. Everyone should take the time to read what they're actually doing, because some actions can destroy data if you're not careful enough.
Helping people in chat or whatever: if you've done that for a while or lurked in a helpdesk-type channel, you'll notice that most of the questions are actually already answered in the FAQ. You'd have to repeat the FAQ because someone is apparently too lazy to read it. That doesn't work for me. It makes people lazy and it encourages rushing through the installation process. Not only with CHDK, but they'll expect the same level of support and step-by-step live-chat help from other projects as well. The instructions are simple enough and if you can't understand them, you should probably not be using CHDK, you're bound to run into other problems. Famous quote: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
What may be done, though, is *restructuring* the FAQ, instructions and maybe the wiki... and a cleanup. A lot of pages are semi-outdated and information is scattered around a bit. It'd probably be a big help for 'newbies' if they didn't have to put much effort into searching (although that might also be a bad thing). Another result of the somewhat scattered state of the wiki is that people (like you) start creating new guides which are.... heh... essentially in the FAQ already.
Last but not least, when making big changes to the wiki (i.e. a front-page link to a tutorial or whatever), get it reviewed by someone before actually linking to it, potentially causing some people to do bad things. It's very easy to miss errors/omissions in things you made yourself and peer-review is a very good tool to getting a correct article.
