Lots of people think that "making of" and "behind the scenes" add value to a work. If you are trying to create your own works, even more so. If you get access to the things referred to in the "making of", even better. If you have all the rights to release things based on those things, even better still.

Think about how much stuff you don't share when you're releasing a binary, even as freeware. Think how much even free software didn't share back when we relied solely on tarball releases. Why did we go to publishing the complete repos?

I don't think it's strained at all to talk about preferred forms of modification for things other than software. Most of most git repos are more or less discarded or ignored. The fact that the full history is there doesn't confuse or distract anyone. And then that day comes when someone needs to go back and trace why something was done the way it was done.


Why was there a glitch in that tree rendering in that hypothetical movie I saw? Oh, actually it was because they were working around some limitation in the software they were using, and that limitation no longer exists because the movie was made ten years ago. And then I can fix it and rerender that part of the movie. I don't get what's difficult about seeing the value of this.

Longevity of cultural artifacts is very much increased if you have the precursor forms and the instructions for turning those into the finished form.

I have the sheets for Queen's Greatest Hits and Queen's Greatest Hits II. One of the greatest gifts I ever received. They have tremendous value to me, in addition to the value of being able to hear the finished rendering in the speakers. Just seeing that wow, for this song, John Deacon actually tunes one of his strings differently from the usual EADG, that teaches you something.

And seeing "Synth 2: Multiple laser beams" in the Flash Gordon sheets is hilarious.