For my personally, I'm hosting an instance so that I can play with it, but also so that I can test new functionality, and help fix issues.
So I think if you are concerned about being a burden, then actively use your instance for the betterment of lemmy!
My recommendation is get an instance going, run it in that latest release candidate, if not the bleeding edge / build from source. Find and report issues. Since you are in DevOps, help expand the operational side / documentation.
I had a PR yesterday to fix nginx config, which you could probably have done as well? Help other people with their instances, document solutions. There are lots of places where you can apply your set of skills, rather than trying to learn Rust and just write code
And I get that, but I feel like there might be better options than an old boys club that requires endorsement to get in. For instance, maybe levels of trust? a newly federated instance gets rate limited or something, so that it can't suddenly start spamming 1000s of posts or whatever
I've only recently setup my own lemmy instance, to test new stuff, fix a few things, whatever. Something like this would prevent me from federating with the content I want to see, and I'd have to go try and be buddies with a trusted instance admin to get endorsed?
I think this may be something we want to discuss more as a community, and see what better solutions might be out there
Gitlab and such generally have issue trackers built in, maybe that would be a good solution?