Honest question: how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable? Users who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.
A better system, but certainly not the best, would be to look at how much "life" issues have, opening, closing (not automatic), and response times.
My project has 200 stars, and I struggle like crazy to update regularly without simple version bumps.
Two years ago, for personal reasons, I had to abandon development of my commercial application, VisualDiffer, which was only available on the Mac App Store.
I had a lot of success with it, but I couldn't follow up on the user reports that deserved respect, so I removed it from the store and continued to provide support to those who asked.
Today, I rewrote 99% of the code in Swift 6.2, still using AppKit, which I deeply love, and I released the source code.
There will be regressions, new bugs, and old bugs, but I hope to improve it with the help of other "crazy people" like me.
I loved the 'Mute filters' feature, but they ruined it forcing to use Leo, expressions like "title:HackerNews" are no longer available and LEO is less useful than a simple search by keyword
but... there is a "but", I use Feedly APIs and I love them, I developed apps for myself to aggregate and quickly find informations starting from the feeds, using Feedly is so easy, so I continue to pay for a really small subset of features only to be able to extract info from my RSS feeds
Probably the language can help to "stay" at 80 like C or C++ but I dare Daniel to write Objective-C or Swift and stay at 80 columns, it's possible but it's hard and I prefer to write code than add carriage returns
The 80-column war remember me the TAB vs Space dispute, I'm a 4 spaces man :)