We're still savanna primates, and silly little things like technical merits aren't going to get in the way of sexy shiny. Projects that understand this fact will attract developers and flourish, and those that don't will languish in forgotten obscurity.
- apache
- lighttpd
- v8
- PostgreSQL
- Linux
- Go
- ZeroMQ
- any imaging library (libpng, libjpeg)
- any compression library (zlib, xz, bzip2)
- urxvt
- vim
- emacs
- tmux
Basically none of these have good websites. When I'm looking for a CSS framework or like, UI tricks like scriptaculous then I think it's a good signal, but past that I really think there's no link here. Really "has a good website" means "someone who knows how to build good websites built one for this project".
Sure because those are examples of what you can do with the tech. You can't really make a website with Qt, so using... PyQt's website as an example for evaluation doesn't make a ton of sense.
I think stuff like this is pretty tribal, which is OK, but we should confuse it with decisions made on technical or experience merits.