For this to make sense for a mainstream user, the music library (metadata AND content) needs to live in the cloud. No always-on server at home, no configuration nightmare. Roon is just an app that you log into on each device, and those apps talk to the cloud.
This is where we must end up to start attracting broader audiences. It may seem like we’ve architected ourselves into a corner because of what the product looks like today. If we were a 30 person dev team, it would be scarier, but pushing around the architecture a bit isn’t scary when the whole architecture still fits in one person’s brain at a reasonable level of detail.
As you point out, mainstream users don’t want always-on servers and have poor success rate setting up appliances on their own. They only use WiFi. If they buy networked audio endpoints, they look more like Soundbars or B+W Zeppelins.
The only thing that a mainstream user’s home network is guaranteed to do somewhat reliably is to let devices talk to the internet. The fact that you can use your phone with WiFi permanently disabled (and in some cases get a better user experience–ever tried to load GPS directions from your own driveway?) means that many phone users are using LTE at home. There’s something subtly brilliant about the Spotify Connect infrastructure–since everything goes through the cloud, any device that can do Facebook can do Spotify Connect.
There are remaining hurdles. Mainstream users prefer music solutions that include content. And they prefer free/ad-supported over paying. These are what I see as the more real barriers for us and the real mainstream user.
In the mean time, there are a lot of more accessible markets to penetrate. Markets with 10s or low 100s of thousands of users that can provide significant growth for a small self-funded organization like ours. Some of those users will be music or audio hobbyists willing to do some legwork, some will use Roon as a companion to a hardware product, and some will be sold Roon via a dealer and receive hand-holding and support via the sales channel, just like with Meridian and Sooloos.