No.

Limits the user base to those willing to put forth the minimal effort needed, thereby maximizing the likelihood their project will get somewhere.

Yes.
Don't Bmad! As you've already found, the MPF support area will likely be the best place to get your MPF questions answered: https://groups.google.com/g/mpf-users/c/aY0UtI6vvkA

If you are unwilling to learn the software beyond what is spoon fed to you then I highly doubt you will get far in your development. I don't mean to be rude, but this post sounds super disrespectful to all of the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into MPF to make pinball development much simpler and within reach of most non-coders.

You are welcome to write a GUI installer, document and maintain it for MPF. We are an open source project and do not charge you money for support. All we ask you for is to be kind for other and not to double post your questions in multiple places (such as this case). If you dont like what we are doing please dont join our community. You can always choose to become part of the problem (complain) or part of the solution (build something better).

Jan

i had that problem the last time too.
am i right you are using windows? there might be some problem with a 3rd party package that mpf uses.

my solution was installing an older version of mpf, and all problems were gone. (of course you might miss some new features then)
so you could try this, here is what i did:

i am using phyton 3.6.

pip install pip setuptools --upgrade --user

#uninstall the existing packages
pip3 uninstall apigpio-mpf asciimatics certifi chardet docutils ffpyplayer future grpcio grpcio-tools idna importlib-metadata irc jaraco.classes jaraco.collections jaraco.functools jaraco.logging jaraco.stream jaraco.text Kivy kivy-deps.angle kivy-deps.glew kivy-deps.glew-dev kivy-deps.gstreamer kivy-deps.gstreamer-dev kivy-deps.sdl2 kivy-deps.sdl2-dev Kivy-Garden more-itertools mpf mpf-mc mpf-monitor Pillow prompt-toolkit protobuf psutil pyfiglet Pygments pypiwin32 PyQt5 pyserial pyserial-asyncio python-osc pytz pyusb pywin32 requests ruamel.yaml six smbus2 smbus2-asyncio sortedcontainers tempora terminaltables typing typing-extensions urllib3 wcwidth zipp

pip install mpf==0.54.3
pip install mpf-mc==0.54.0
pip install mpf-monitor==0.54.1
pip install PyQt5

so on a working mpf install on my current windows pc all the versions look like this:
asciimatics 1.11.0
certifi 2019.11.28
chardet 3.0.4
docutils 0.15.2
ffpyplayer 4.3.1
future 0.18.2
grpcio 1.31.0
grpcio-tools 1.31.0
idna 2.8
Kivy 1.11.1
kivy-deps.glew 0.1.12
kivy-deps.glew-dev 0.1.12
kivy-deps.gstreamer 0.1.18
kivy-deps.gstreamer-dev 0.1.18
kivy-deps.sdl2 0.1.23
kivy-deps.sdl2-dev 0.1.23
Kivy-Garden 0.1.4
mpf 0.54.3
mpf-mc 0.54.0
mpf-monitor 0.54.1
Pillow 6.2.1
pip 21.2.4
prompt-toolkit 3.0.8
protobuf 3.13.0
psutil 5.7.0
pyfiglet 0.8.post1
Pygments 2.3.1
pypiwin32 223
PyQt5 5.15.2
PyQt5-sip 12.8.1
pyserial 3.4
pyserial-asyncio 0.4
pywin32 227
requests 2.22.0
ruamel.yaml 0.15.100
setuptools 58.1.0
six 1.15.0
sortedcontainers 2.1.0
terminaltables 3.1.0
typing 3.7.4.1
urllib3 1.25.7
wcwidth 0.1.7

hope that helps.
have not tried the newer version on linux, i heard that there it isn't so much of a problem.

i really do love mpf, it is awesome.

i don't think Bmad21 wanted to be disrespectful, i have been in the same situation, and it any unforseen error is at first frustrating. i spent some time on installing packages in specific versions, but couldn't figure it out how to solve that problem.
i read in a forum that there is some compatibility problem with some packages (gstreamer), and that lead me to trying an older version.

so please keep up the good work with mpf , it really changed my life. actually my life ist just pinball right now

I don’t think an executable is a bad idea— but it’s just more work that someone has to take on, when as Jan mentioned — mpf is completely free and has years of work into it by multiple people, not to mention fantastic docs and even a support forum. All 100% free.

The install can be frustrating though - I do feel you there. But complaining about it doesn’t come off well for an open source project. stefanmaders advice above is great— with that working list you should be able to install the correct versions of each package to match his list and run 0.54 at least.

The way it’s setup is kind of a nice gatekeeper though honestly — if you don’t have patience or want to deal with the pretty basic install, mpf might not be for you. You can always go the prproc route and spend hours coding in python if preferred.

and like i said, i do think that that exact problem does not occur on linux (have not tested that).
but that also could be a nice solution.

Furthermore, the GStreamer warning has nothing to do with MPF, it is upstream and has been discussed multiple times in different arenas. If you are new, you wouldn't know this, so not fault to you. But most importantly, it doesn't impact anything. The game will still run 100%, it just flashes in your logs a couple times, but doesn't prevent anything.

At the moment we do not have a dedicated windows maintainer. We would love some help in that area. Generally we build our windows packages on continious integration for multiple python versions and also test mpf and mpf-mc on the target environment. Since CI always installs from scratch and then tests everything this definitely works in general. However, there might be cases where the environment is different from our CI. Guess this can be fixed/improved but somebody has to debug it. Any help would be welcome. Unfortunately, debugging other peoples computers is not the most fun and rewarding activity which is why companies charge money for it.

That is very true. Caused a lot of confusion over the last years. This happens until you got every possible codec on earth installed which probably only is true for very few people. For everybody else this warning is harmless.

Jan