Ah, you are mostly talking to brian d foy's points. I don't have experience trying to patch a Dist::Zilla module beyond having noticed that several mundane things that I'd normally do to try to start such a process run into a lack of Dist::Zilla and effectively stopped me. Brian said something about even the module code is turned into a template. Perhaps he didn't realize that the template mostly usually doesn't impact the code? I wouldn't know as I haven't surveyed any Dist::Zilla modules on that point. I don't know how many he has vs. how many you have.

The author of a Dist::Zilla-using module that was present didn't disagree with brian's points. He even mentioned wanting to remove the Dist::Zilla dependency and not being sure even how to do that (I thought he should write a Dist::Zilla plug-in that removes the dependency for you).

Preventing others from even doing "make test" is a pretty big roadblock. Sure, for many modules you can get away with skipping the "make" step and just hope that "perl -Ilib t/blah" actually works immediately. That certainly isn't my habit or assumption. I know of at least one module of mine (not yet on CPAN) where that assumption doesn't hold. So, when somebody hits that roadblock, they might decide to dive in and figure out how they can work around having no "make test".

Thanks for noting that it often isn't hard to work-around.