Thanks for the response. It's great that you're trying to build something that will allow folks to do self-hosting well, I'm fully on board with this aim. My point about the political bits though, is that even for folks that agree with you, pushing the political bits too much can signal that you're not confident enough in the technical merits of what you're doing for them to stand on their own.

Re: the paperwork vs code thing - While a full white paper on your theoretical foundations would be nice, IMO the table stakes for getting people to take your product seriously is a sentence or two on the model you're using. For example, adding something like: "We aim to prioritise consistency and partition tolerance over availability, and use the raft algorithm for leader elections. Our particular focus is making sure the storage system is really good at handling X and Y." or whatever would be a huge improvement, until you can get around to writing up the details.

The problem with "we write code" is that your users are unlikely to trust you to be writing the correct code, when there's so little evidence that you've thought deeply about how to solve the hard problems inherent in distributed storage.