Ben Boldt wrote:
How can we make it so that someone fresh and new with big ideas wandering into here can find a way without being told "no", and do it without convincing others to pay or do work for them? ... At this point, that consists of gathering ideas in an organized way instead of tossing them.
Nobody's saying no to the idea of a new mapper, we're just saying "no it's not going to become a new standard for NESDev." The idea is fine, but your expectations for its purpose weren't realistic.
Ben Boldt wrote:
We can take all of these plentiful crazy dreams, and filter them into a united vision, considering cheaper parts of the future, which would allow us to develop and evolve a complex, easy-to-use solution, very small bits at a time where and when people see that they can contribute.
Well, people are already doing that in myriad ways. I already mentioned NESMaker. Sour took up a mission to make a newer better debugging emulator called Mesen. In my own work I'm trying to make open source examples, and contribute to emulators or other tools (e.g. NSFPlay). Dougeff is writing tutorials and improving a music library called Famitone. Tepples made his own music engine called Pently, and is continually providing open source examples and tools. Many of us contribute to the NESDev Wiki, either adding new information or improving the quality and organization of existing information. The Mojon Twins released an open source NES game framework. kasumi is making an NES animation tool. NovaSquirrel wrote a powerpak implementation for a popular new(ish) mapper, and released a substantial platformer game as open source. InfiniteNESLives has been manufacturing boards and development tools for a reasonable cost. RetroUSB released a high quality NES clone. Lexington Alexander is interviewing NES developers and publishing a periodical magazine. Lots of people on this forum make themselves available for more direct and personalized answers to questions. lidnariq has been particularly helpful in the area of electrical engineering questions. (I want to keep making this list, but there's just too much to possibly be comprehensive. Apologies to everyone missed out here.)
There's a ton of ongoing work to this effect, these are just a few
recent examples off the top of my head. There's a lot of stuff I've omitted, and this place goes back well over a decade. At one point this place was just
a pile of links to miscellaneous text documents and relatively small demos. The kind of progress you're talking about
is happening constantly.
Ben Boldt wrote:
I am just sharing my ideas and looking for feedback how we could work together as a group to create large-scale, well-planned platforms to support each other, and also to provide my skills wherever possible. ... What can we volunteer to work on now, ahead of time, to make things approachable for future developers that will emerge?
So... that's an extremely vague and open ended question. All I can say is maybe take a look around and try to find an existing project that you think you could improve. My very incomplete list above is a small but varied set of examples of things that seem to fit the bill, depending on what your interests are. You could try making a game or a demo and see where you feel the experience could be improved, then address that.