There's a long-standing contention that open software developers aren't good at producing user documentation. (Actually, the contention is more along the lines of 'they suck at it.') I probably fall in the developer category for that purpose, although I'd like to think I'm a little better at writing the stuff than the mean. However, given my epic-in-my-own-mind battles with Texinfo and makeinfo, I wonder if there might be a bit more to it.
Namely, maybe sometimes developers don't write good user documentation because of their tools.
I know, I know -- it's a poor workman who blames his tools. But sometimes they are to blame. Think about it: what tools are used to write the good documentation? Microsoft Word, probably. Which a lot of open sourcerers won't use (or won't be caught using). What's left? Stuff like Docbook, Texinfo, raw HTML, OpenOffice Writer (which is pretty close to Word in many ways).. And, let's face it, many of those don't make writing simple -- even if the author has good user communication skills. So if it's so frustrating, what's the point? Back to writing code..
Or maybe I'm just peeved because I've been fighting with makeinfo for weeks and it's really frying my bacon.