Hi!
Sure, but I'm not really worried about potential false positives. I'm worried that we're building a giant write-only data store.
Fortunately, we are not doing that.
Unless you're talking about pulling a small set of values, in which case Lua/templates are probably the best venue.
I'm not sure what small means here. We have about 46 U.S. Presidents, is that small enough? Which Lua functions and templates could I use?
No, list of presidents is not small enough. Lua right now can fetch specific data from specific item. Which is OK if you know the item and what you're getting (e.g. infoboxes, etc.) but not good for lists of items, especially with complicated conditions. That use case currently needs external tools - like bots.
Wikidata began in October 2012. I thought it might take till 2014 or even 2015 to get querying capability into a usable state, but we're now looking
Please do not confuse your particular use case with querying not be usable at all. It is definitely usable and being used by many people for many things. Generating lists directly from wiki template is not supported yet, and we're working on it. I'm sorry that your use case is not supported and you're feeling disappointed. But we do have query capability and it can be used and is being used for many other things.
Of course, contributions - in any form, query development, code development, design, frontend, backend, data contributions, etc. - are always welcome.
to even contribute to it when it feels like putting data into a giant system that you can't really get back out. I love Magnus and I have a ton
Again, this is not correct - you can read data back out and there are several ways you can use query functionality for it right now. The way you want to do it is not supported - yet - but there are many other ways. Which we are constantly improving. But we can't do everything at once. Please be patient, please contribute with what you can, and we'll get there.