Before I get to the matter at hand, please bear with me on this:
When I was 13, I had to go to a boys-only boarding school, in Kenya, and for that first year some 18 - 20 year old prefects were in charge of us new boys (they called us the rabble). They were allowed to punish us in what ever way they wanted, some of them bullied and beat us with canes, and generally made life not worth living! - many homesick tears at night!
A few years on I ended up working as a photo-lithographer, in New Zealand, and that trade was eventually taken over by Macs. I worked for many years on Mac Pros using $80,000 specialist proprietary software, assembling and separating up to 8 colors for the highest level in packaging, and because it was specialized work, I didn't get much opportunity to deal with the technical side of Macs (this was discouraged). Most of the time I only used the mouse and hot keys.
About 4 years ago I discovered Blender, and was delighted! I felt the program was made for me. I have had great fun learning and discovering new things about it. The free software is much more user friendly, and easier to use than that $80,000 program that I used to work with! (By the way, I've never had any problem installing Blender)
A couple of months ago I found a reference to Blender.se on the Blender website and decided to check it out. My first impression was that this site is not very friendly. Since then I've made a little progress, but I'm constantly worried about saying the wrong thing, or making a fool of myself.
The actual problem:
I'm concerned about the structure of Blender.se, - the somewhat silly, childish, game-like business of having 'points' and 'badges' — and making other people feel superior because they have more 'points' than you. I would have thought that Blender is interesting enough to encourage people to participate without these 'props'. I find that the Blender.se structure is drowning this brilliant program called Blender, — it should be working for, not against, Blender.
How many budding Blender users have been scared off the site, I wonder? Have you noticed how it is dominated by the more technical users' questions, and the newer users don't seem to stay very long? We are all only human, I think, and everyone should be encouraged - not discouraged. It shouldn't be just for the more intelligent or 'clued-up' people, and 'to hell' with everyone else.
I made the reference to school at the beginning because this site reminds me of it. The reference to my work, on Macs, is to point out the fact that you can work well with software without necessarily knowing much about what goes on 'under the hood'.
Now I find myself arguing with others (people with 'bells' and 'whistles', and 'points' and 'badges') about whether or not my question, "How to use blender command lines in OSX?" is off-topic or not. They, (who must be obeyed), have come to the conclusion that the fact that I can't get the Render/ Command Lines (in the Blender Manual) to work, is my problem, and should have nothing to do with Blender or Blender.se. It has everything to do with Blender, - what is Blender without a computer? What is Blender.se without questions about Blender (which runs on computers, including Macs)? If anything, those people are 'off-topic' for excluding this question, which just happens to be, about Blender. I wanted to delete the question when it was rejected, but that was 'not permitted', - another 'Gestapo'-like rule!
On the 'Command Line' Manual page there should be some reference to the fact that you might have to do certain other things to make these command lines work, depending on your operating system - and that just typing them in may not be enough.
Some of this is probably not relevant to meta, but I needed to get it off my chest. It was a question of either this, or — "I've had enough, I quit, goodbye!" back there on the question page. (Thank you to stacker, ideasman42 and iKlsR for your encouragement.) :)
