Hi Herman,
Like most other users, creators want their stuff to "just work". I don't think those connecting a cheap USB MIDI keyboard to their Linux box deserve to be considered pioneers or freaks.
I completely agree, and we do support that kind of device in 64 Studio. However for the free software purist, this expectation cannot always be satisfied, because of the need for binary firmware to be uploaded to the device.
One of the things we realised early on, was that it is impossible to be all things to all people. So we try to make the best possible free software experience for creative people, but our distro would probably never be endorsed by RMS, or others like him.
A case in point - we want to ship Xara LX because it's a great code contribution to free software, from the company that built it. At the moment it contains one non-free library called cdraw, so many distros haven't shipped the application. But if the Xara developers don't get any users for the Linux version then they will not see the point of spending any more time on it, or GPL'ing the last library.
Cheers! Daniel