I worked with ROS1 professionally for a few years. My big takeaway was that the middleware got a lot more attention than it deserved. There are tons of hard research problems to work on in robotics: reliable navigation, object recognition, planning, manipulation, etc. I felt like a better contribution to open source robotics would be some great class libraries for those things. But let your users wire them up however they want, rather than requiring them to fit into a predefined architecture.
This was exactly my experience. We used DDS for our non-ROS parts but ROS2 was experimental at the time so we ended up needing to build bridges for everything that was ROS. Brining in even a single ROS package to not have to reinvent things was a huge pain point and ROS had issues where it couldn't be used across everything.