I used to be of the camp that excellent documentation for your code was a necessity. All that pretty syntax and comments above every function declaration. It made me feel like putting icing on a cake...I still agree this is required for public facing APIs and stuff offered by a company or a complicated project.
But documentation is only part of the story. You really need a full team of smart technical people, writers, and "dev evangelists" that are creating sample projects, tutorials, quick start guides, and giving feedback to the engineers on how easy their APIs are to use and understand. You can't just auto-generate docs and think you're done.
That said, I much prefer open source projects to be organized logically and the code to be "self-documenting". Don't make me wade through mounds of API documentation when I usually just end up going to the source anyway to figure out what's going on.
But documentation is only part of the story. You really need a full team of smart technical people, writers, and "dev evangelists" that are creating sample projects, tutorials, quick start guides, and giving feedback to the engineers on how easy their APIs are to use and understand. You can't just auto-generate docs and think you're done.
That said, I much prefer open source projects to be organized logically and the code to be "self-documenting". Don't make me wade through mounds of API documentation when I usually just end up going to the source anyway to figure out what's going on.