...and that is okay.

Unfortunately, I have to say that I disagree with almost every statement and sentiment in your post. Your three fundamental qualities? These are meaningless. Even 10 years ago, reach was based on advertisement and luck. Whether or not other people find it and think it is useful is a very brittle sequence of events. Sociality is the same thing. A loyal following is certainly not a sign of a good software and vice versa. And you there a so many examples of large projects with open betas and community event that still suck when they finally come out. And finish? Oh my - my wife has to use this popular software for analyzing sound data and it is a badly built Java application that constantly crashes and is not intuitive at all. Windows itself has been a mess for 30 years and has been "maintained" all this time. Do I need to go on?

And just like art, sometimes you look at it and might say: "I could have done that."