> and good luck making marketing material that excludes people that want to give you money.
You're completely missing my point. Web pages are the way they are because they pull eyeballs. You are a single data point. You don't like slick webpages? Fine, you're an outlier. There are people out there that don't go online at all. They're also an outlier. You each find niches to cater to you, but you're not the majority case, and if you're interested in eyeballs for whatever reason, then dealing with the majority case is in your interests.
It's not just marketing either. Compare Arch's wiki (simple Mediawiki) to Debian's. Mediawiki is more complex than Debian's simple pages, yet it is far more readable. Even as 'just a tool, not marketing'[1], this heavier webpage is a better webpage.
[1] marketing isn't just selling stuff. for example, plenty of free software projects provide giveaways to conferences to raise their profile
You're completely missing my point. Web pages are the way they are because they pull eyeballs. You are a single data point. You don't like slick webpages? Fine, you're an outlier. There are people out there that don't go online at all. They're also an outlier. You each find niches to cater to you, but you're not the majority case, and if you're interested in eyeballs for whatever reason, then dealing with the majority case is in your interests.
It's not just marketing either. Compare Arch's wiki (simple Mediawiki) to Debian's. Mediawiki is more complex than Debian's simple pages, yet it is far more readable. Even as 'just a tool, not marketing'[1], this heavier webpage is a better webpage.
[1] marketing isn't just selling stuff. for example, plenty of free software projects provide giveaways to conferences to raise their profile