This is a great point; implementations always compromise on speed, generality, domain decomposition, flexibility, ease of use/debugging, compile time, etc... I

This is a great point; implementations always compromise on speed, generality, domain decomposition, flexibility, ease of use/debugging, compile time, etc... It's always a compromise subject to design goals of the project or just personal preferences. There are a lot of reads on the Internet about specific compromises chosen for a technology but contrasting choices between projects or versions of a project are difficult to find. Also I think large systems are just as informative as smaller ones but require more investment.