Certainly you understand my general sentiment, yes? Which is that the project page does not attempt to specifically define itself; Rather it assumes the reader understands it's purpose.

Server side application alone is a useful enough specifier.

The only relevant word in it's first few paragraphs is "stack" which has been claimed by the Web people ("full stack developer").

This is analogous to American's omitting the specifier that "America" because they assume all of their readers are also American.

I think the basic sin here is trading specificity for elegance. Your readme is very elegant, but it's not very informative for people from outside your target domain. This will include students and beginners to your target domain, which will ultimately hurt your adoption.

My point can be summed up as this:

"go-to template for the perfect stack" is jargon that only has meaning for a narrow subset of your audience.

"Perfect" is also overselling this thing. I respect tools that give me a clear idea of when to use it, and when not to.

This slogan ultimately says "Stator is a template"

What is a template? That term is far too overloaded to be useful.

I'd call this thing "an opinionated starting point for modern web applications". The most informative section of the document is the "Technical Stack" section.

Now what I'm trying to figure out is what aspect of this thing is not "glue" that holds these pieces together? Is it all glue?

Just to be clear, I think this repo has tremendous value. I'm giving you my stream of consciousness feedback in an effort to help you understand what the average developer's immediate response to this page is.

I think if you sent this link to any random developer on slack, their first response would be "what is it?". I think your readme can do a bit better job answering that question.