The year I got my Ruby Hero award was the year that I (partially) convinced core team members to name the RC release of Rails “race car” because Dave ditched us to play Max Verstappen. He didn’t come to RailsConf because of a race.
The years he did come, he usually will come be there for his keynote, maybe see him at dinner, and then he’s gone. Everyone else is pumped to be there. Core and contributors show up, actually go to talks for all the days, conduct birds of a feather sessions and hack and chat.
On the day that 1/3 of basecamp quit I had a realization that he really just didn’t care about us. We were resources to be exploited.
I still really like the rails community, but it keeps feeling like Dave wants that to be exclusively defined around him. Which doesn’t feel like a community.
Yes, some projects include themselves in the community. Others are involved in the community. Others set out to actively build and maintain a community. There's no one model fits all here.
The ideal community has a power balance. It (can be) hard on a DHH-like figure at conferences because some percentage of folk treat it as a bug-reporting forum, or feature-request session. People don't want to get to know you, they just want your attention.
I've been to "conferences" (community driven, large user groups) where the Supreme leader is there, and where they aren't. Frankly the ones where they are not there are more interesting.
At conferences when they are there, the focus tends to be more on what they said (usually with gross misinterpretations) coupled with a lot of whining about what they're doing wrong.
When we're "alone" it's more about the community, sharing knowledge, more positivity etc.
IMO the ideal community does not centre on the project lead. It works better when the power imbalance is absent. And yes, this sometimes makes the community feel powerless (which they are). But it's still better.