Yes, we plan to move away from Modulus, and time spent on modulus is generally poorly spent. (Definitely nobody else should spend hours figuring out a dev environment.)
However making specific modulus fixes can be worthwhile. Particularly I wanted to fix the version sorting bug, which we really should have been treating as a blocker (i.e. it was impossible to download the latest reporting module from modules.openmrs.org). But, keeping your point in mind Mark, I deployed a one-older version of the modulus-ui code that fixes the version sorting in the UI layer, and I’m going to stop spending time on this now.
(We paused making a decision on going to bintray because we were waiting on a potential offer from JFrog to give us a free open-source instance of Artifactory, to consider how those compared. Per this thread I think Rafal and I are thinking that if we haven’t gotten an answer from them by the end of the year, we should just proceed with bintray or with github releases.)