Yea if Owlbear Rodeo 1.0 goes open source at some point, that's great. One thing I liked about it when I read up on it before was the aggressive client-side stuff. If your team was serious about it and used firefox, it seemed like you'd be almost guaranteed to have full functionality, and if you all used a VPN then many of the "we block this kind of upload" stuff would also go away, as it was ISP-side. You'd still need a coherent way of doing stuff though, and it looks like the big reason they even moved to 2.0 was because they ended up having to do much of the work as peer-to-peer was blocked by an ISP, and of course, that's not something normal people can detect or debug. They even detail the problems that Chrome and Safari have, as only Firefox supports the standards for storing client-side data.
Either way, that's all nice and fine, but Owlbear 2.0 is probably what I want to use. The lower right has a little button which says "5 foot", which is actually all grid-related settings. You can change it to either hex type there, or change it to squares, and modify the look of the grid itself, so that it is more visible over any images you have imported.
I still don't see how to change the base background color from the dark blue/gray default though.
As far as recruiting people from roll20- I had no idea people met and formed games on roll20. If I am looking for players online, which one day I might be, I'd probably use a discord for a specific setting (ex: the Hyperborea discord) or a forum that selects for players I'd want, such as this one. But maybe I'd be missing out, I have no idea. Either way, I want to move away from roll20 as soon as I can, if possible, so I can never give them another penny.