It is really the latter. But it is not restricted to aerial robotics, just the ROS environment in general.
Most of the time, when I find open-source code (relative to a research paper for example), and I would like to run it on my computer, I either have the wrong version of ROS, Gazebo, some ROS package, etc.
A good example is the switch between catkin and colcon. I spent hours trying to understand what changes were needed to compile a catkin project with colcon (I learned CMake in the process, which is a good thing in the end 
). On the documentation side, many things could be improved. For example, I lost a lot of hours trying to understand something that was not consistent with the documentation (this was on the PX4 Autopilot), before finding the solution in the PRs of the GitHub repository. Good practice is to push the change in code and its associate change in documentation the same day, this is not always respected (I love and thank the people behind the PX4 autopilot project, you people rock !).
Note that even though I raise the issue, I know that this is a very broad problem, not only with open-source projects. Also backwards compatibility is not always desirable nor possible… and I can’t stress enough that open-source contributing is a benevolent activity ; I cannot criticize the hard work of contributors, behind myself a user !
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