Yeah, I feel this is often so true, perhaps I'm a little less pessimistic, but not much. The best way I'd visualise it for FOSS is that it's sort of an oscillat

Yeah, I feel this is often so true, perhaps I'm a little less pessimistic, but not much. The best way I'd visualise it for FOSS is that it's sort of an oscillating walk upwards (over time) to improvement - though any set of changes could set you back or forward. Then, the big thing that hits (and where you're "decline significantly") happens is that there's some a) change of fashion (lets re-do it with trendy new language/framework etc), b) change contributors which leads to "lets do version 3.0" or the darn thing dies out! I've often wondered why the 'classics' such as CLI tools seem to be resistant to this. I suspect that over time users just learn to live with the "bugs" and don't expect any further changes: from a time when "being 1.0" meant it was complete!