Something I’ll add to the conversation as someone who has been observing the relationship between Roblox and its power user community for a long time.
There’s always been a major disconnect between product leadership and what’s in the best interest of both Roblox and its developer community. Unofficial tools like rojo came into existence because product was insistent on all infrastructure and systems used by developers being built in-house with all of the backwards compatibility nuances and scuff hidden underneath flashy UX products. The resulting dynamic was the community having to navigate through this scuff ourselves, reverse engineering the specs by hand, and writing thousands of lines of code to interop with Roblox’s existing formats.
Now granted, the situation is a bit more nuanced and complicated. Roblox’s formats are not super friendly or stable in their current form. It has been an upkeep nightmare to create software that inter-ops with these formats. Given the limited engineering resources to clean up these problems, I can’t say I blame Roblox for focusing more on product and user experience rather than the actual toolset needs of external developers.
Far as I see it though, the time for excuses has passed. This problem is not going away, and I’d rather see Roblox develop flexible public specs for their file formats that take inspiration from what the community has built so far. You shouldn’t need a computer science degree to create software that interops with the engine. Not everything has to be in-house developed, all we ask for is a stable flexible spec to build upon.
Undertaking everything I’ve done over the years personally has lead to burnout, both on my part and from talented engineers like lpg, who wanted Roblox to take this direction all along while he was working at Roblox. Instead… we got packages, and those have been sitting in a weird limbo for the past 2-3 years without any stable conflict resolving for modified package forks. Roblox tried to add their own merge conflict resolver for drafts in studio, and it’s just like… why? Does it really need to be an in-studio thing when it could just use industry standards like git?
If Roblox really wants to be the metaverse platform, it needs to open its guts up for people to build upon and stop running from these existing file spec problems. I trust the new blood at Roblox will know what to do, I just hope leadership is willing to listen this time.