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oh no, not again :)

please don't misunderstand me, i'm pretty sure your intentions are good and, in fact, really appreciated. however... there's a couple of things you should have in mind about qtractor's mission and design:

qtractor was and still is meant to be a part of the Linux audio/MIDI ecosystem, not the whole of it--how important that part is is entirely up to you--that is, it doesn't live on its own as a stand-alone sound and music production application. as i'm often found repeating it ad nauseam, qtractor is not a DAW rather an audio/MIDI sequencer with (some) DAW features.

as you already realized, you'll need MIDI sound generators, like synths or samplers, either in MIDI instrument plug-in form or external stand-alone soft-instruments, or even plain outboard hardware, to render MIDI stuff; qtractor is NOT like the all-in-one monolithic wonder applications that you usually find in the full-fledged DAWs out there.

iow. qtractor is some kind of a hybrid: it's not quite a monolith and not pure modular-to-the-bone, it's something in between and, on my watch, will stay like that for many and lasting years to come :)

finally, qtractor has no capital(istic) nor commercial agenda whatsoever; although a growing user-base might be certainly beneficial (to its own ego), it is NOT a life-and-death condition.

re. There must be some open source instruments available, but I'm having a hard time finding them.

don't tell me you've been living under a rock :D just kidding.

yours truly vee-ones are the nearest examples here found ;) but there are plenty of others, some with way greater prospects eg. linuxsampler (and would ya tell its official frond-end is also yours truly yet again?), zynaddsubfx or yoshimi">; i'd suggest you to try the awesome kxstudio and also get some acquaintance to the swiss army knife of linuxaudio ?

re. side note, it doesn't seem like using the mouse to create MIDI files is an option

please try:

1. add a new MIDI track: Track/Add Track...
2. add a new MIDI clip: Clip/New...
3. enter a brand new session name which will do as file-name prefix (you do this only once, on a blank session).
4. on the MIDI clip editor (aka. piano-roll) set Edit/Select Mode/Edit On (aka. the pencil button).
5. use the mouse to enter notes and events by click and drag and move, etc.
6. hit File/Save.

that's it.

hth.
cheers