To re-frame the question: why do you care how many stars (presumably you're talking about github stars?) you have? Does the number of stars change what you develop or how you develop it?
Losing sleep over github star count is akin to losing sleep over up/downvotes on HackerNews or thumbs on Your Favorite Social Media Site. Tying one's self-worth to them, or one's self-image of one's own works to them, is... well, kinda sad.
> i might just be wrong about what the market wants right now.
Github stars are no indication of "what the market wants" - they're an indication of how many people (or scripted bots) have seen the project, thought "huh, interesting," and clicked the star so that they have a bookmark of it for later reference in their github settings.
2. How many of those stars are bots?
no bots. we are a team of students with no budget for that. They're all real developers with commit histories and real profiles. looked at this already.
I guess my question here is more like how are builds with minimal efforts getting more recognition than ones built by teams and for months? It's annoying to see "inferred" context getting more recognition than actual deterministic structure