When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again.
Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.
This reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list.
One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.
For instance, you can put a thousand temperature sensors in a room, which give you 1000 temperature readouts. But all these temperature sensors are correlated, and if you project them down to latent space (using PCA or PLS if linear, projection to manifolds if nonlinear) you’ll create maybe 4 new latent variables (which are usually linear combinations of all other variables) that describe all the sensor readings (it’s a kind of compression). All you have to do then is control those 4 variables, not 1000.
In the chemical space, there are thousands of possible combinations of process conditions and mixtures that produce certain characteristics, but when you project them down to latent variables, there are usually less than 10 variables that give you the properties you want. So if you want to create a new chemical, all you have to do is target those few variables. You want a new product with particular characteristics? Figure out how to get < 10 variables (not 1000s) to their targets, and you have a new product.