Thank you Tim for the great detailed feedback. I'm going to put aside $500 to any of the existing developers to work on re-writing the documentation again (for both drivers + clients) using detailed & clear to use instructions with images + text + examples...etc. If anyone is interested in taking this task, please let me know.

I look forward to seeing the results of your documentation project, it's definitely the right thing to do.
I just had a long chat on the phone with one of my professional programmer friends. He had looked at the documentation in an effort to help me but also found it somewhat sparse and confusing. I really think that once this is sorted the uptake of Indi will be much stronger and that uptake could be exponential. I would also imagine that even more device manufacturers would then be in the position of having to write Indi drivers much as in the past they had to write ASCOM drivers for their product to be accepted into the astronomy community.

Hey Tim, thanks for the really good and detailed feedback. We can't get better as a project and community without knowing what we need to fix. I can talk to at least one of the points. The reason it took you so long to get to that information is that I didn't create it until you voiced your issues with the existing documentation. I threw that together basically overnight to try to fill in the gaps, trying to remember my pain points when initially getting into INDI development. Obviously I didn't quite fill in enough of them, but if you are willing, I'd like to work with you make it better. I've been doing C++ development for a long time, so I forget the learning curve of someone new, and having your perspective would be nice as I'm updating the docs.

I am very grateful you put that tutorial together. It helped clear up many points for me
I would say the most important documentation to start with would be a very detailed account of how to set up the development environment. Especially with the removal of KDESudo and the new look QTCreator. Also a look at what the difference is between native and 3rd party drivers. Am I developing a 3rd party or a native driver ? I have no idea. And which should I produce ?
Then for both client and driver developers a detailed look at how the messaging between them occurs. I don't mean at the protocol level that indiserver implements but at what that means for developers. For a driver what functions get called by a client and when. Can a driver send a message to the client at any time etc etc. So some practical examples with diagrams as to how this all works. For example a diagram of what the server sends to a driver when it connects. When does the driver creator function get called ? When does the initproperties function get called etc etc. So a timeline drawing of how the client, indiserver and driver interact during the initial connection, for the interactions during normal operation and finally during shutdown.
I know that the project is very focussed on error free communication, that is obvious from the sample code. However it does not make the sample code easy to read when a large part of the functionality is built into the condition statement of an If Else. Much more readable would be to separate that out. So the functionality sets a local variable to true or false which is then tested. The conditions that have double negatives in them are even worse. I know this makes for elegant code that shows off the skill of the programmer as to how much he can get done in a single line, but for a C++ newbie it means 10 minutes deciphering a single line of code !
I would suggest some code with no error checking is published. Not for operational use of course but to make the basic program flow easier to understand. Then a version with error checking included but in the simple manner I describe above, and then the preferred final version. Only then can the student get their head around the flashy code that the best programmers can write
All this could be done in a simple driver that just talks to an arduino or some such device to get and set a single value and display it. Maybe with a switch element as well. Then the student can play with everything they need to know. It's all very well having tutorials that don't talk to a real device but that leaves a steep learning curve as to how to actually do serial communications with the hardware for which it seems Indi has some useful functions.
I was also very confused about where everything gets put in the development environment. I wound up with the source code, a build folder and I was never sure where the installed code I was writing got run from. I wound up with multiple binaries of my driver and didn't have a clue which one was actually being used when I invoked them from EKos to try and debug. I would up always changing a bit of text in my code, like the name of the driver, so I could see from the client what was being actually run.
And that's before we get onto XML files, where they go and if I need one for my driver for Indi to see it.
So a map of where all the files go during the development process on a standard Linux machine and what are being run when would really really help.
Hope this helps, if it sounds confused it's because I am