Gstreamer - cool when it works, utterly depressing and mysterious when it doesn't

I think I've learnt something worthwhile from nearly every project I've been involved with. If I had to pick one however:

Started an open source project designed for projecting multimedia content during church services as procrastination from final year undergrad revision.

Fast forward nearly a decade, and I've learnt tremendous amounts as a result of starting it - dealing with everything from GStreamer on a native C layer, right through to WebRTC stuff (STUN, TURN, ICE, etc.) at the other end. What started as some odd attempts to show text and images on a screen in a user friendly fashion has grown tremendously, and is now used all over the world.

How I envision the package maintainer for gstreamer, every time they're getting ready to push updates, knowing that the end user will have to spend the next 35 minutes in front of their bash console, watching each package build...