More beginner-friendly/welcoming issue template? (Or have multiple templates)

[rootwork]

Hi! So I am new to this repo obviously, and just proposed #666. I found the issue template a little...surprising in the way it was set up. I thought I'd just relate what I experienced and let maintainers decide if anything is worth changing.

0. First I want to say that it may be you intend to have there be something of a barrier to creating new issues, because you want people to familiarize themselves with the project first, because you were getting too many vague suggestions, because you want to be sure they are serious proposals, etc. So if this is an intentional framing of how you want folx to experience contributing then go ahead and close this.
1. I was surprised that "rationale" and/or "impact" were not first in the template. Maybe most people are able to fit a summary of the entire proposal in their title, but I was not, and it felt strange to delve into technical details before explaining why I thought it was important.
2. "Scope/difficulty" felt like it should come after the proposal itself (else it encourages explaining most of the proposal under the framework of "scope") and it surprised me that I was being asked to assess something like "difficulty." Again, maybe you're being intentional about wanting a barrier to vague proposals, but I was making a feature request without knowing the details of RR's backend, so I really had no way of knowing what the (technical) difficulty level of the proposal was. (Also, since it was a feature request, there would probably be varying levels of difficulty depending on how exactly it was executed on a technical level.)
3. Then at the end, "how to actually do this" felt even more daunting. Um...I dunno how to do this, I just found your project! I love it, and want to help, but asking for something close to an outline of a PR felt like contributions weren't really open to beginners like me. I realize the comments under that heading frame it more as just asking for suggestions, so maybe it's more about the heading itself.

For one source of references, I've used the https://github.com/dec0dOS/amazing-github-template project in my own projects and found it helpful. In particular it has separate templates for bugs, feature requests, and code improvements, which I've found very useful. In this case, perhaps a template for code improvements would have space for technical implementation, while templates for bug reports and feature requests could be a little more open-ended.

I hope I'm able to convey that I'm aware I'm new to this project and might not appreciate the systems you've set up and how they work for you. If these feel like unhelpful suggestions then please feel free to dismiss them -- the last thing I want to do is tell you how to run your own project. (That said, if you are open to changes, I can definitely do a PR, because I feel 1000% more confident in GitHub issue templates than most of the languages [except JS] you're using 😄 )

Thanks for the tireless work you've done over the years to make this project shine!

[DeeDeeG]

I've been meaning to have a lighter-weight template. I think having a blank one is a good start... I put so much effort into the one template we have I am biased/attached to it, but it's healthier that we have less barriers to contribution, rather than just the one template I'm sentimental about.

We get a lot of suggestions where maybe we as maintainers would feel differently to the person who opened the issue, and it's maybe not clear why we should do it. I wanted to make it the most likely we could recover a common ground by explaining more of where the issue poster was coming from. At least that's the idea -- that's what the template I put together was meant to solve.

Several times I considered adding a blank one... This is the first major project I became a maintainer on, and everything I change feels a bit sentimental... But it's really for the best to have a much lighter (if not totally blank) template to choose.

Your specific proposals seem thoughtful on first skim. Worth looking into. Thanks!

Edit/Update: There is now the blank issue template.