I don't know the history of this, but it's entirely reasonable that this was a case of mismanaged expectations, a phenomenon that happens a lot in this industry

I don't know the history of this, but it's entirely reasonable that this was a case of mismanaged expectations, a phenomenon that happens a lot in this industry. In other words, maybe they thought Jigsaw will evolve into an OSGi replacement and it didn't, while introducing migration challenges. It's reasonable because the current implementation is an evolution of the original plan and maybe it evolved in a direction that Red Hat eventually disagreed with. Of course, maybe this version was scaled back in order for it to be actually released, but note that the main complaint of the others voting No is that there's a lack of consensus on the open issues. The "fragmentation of Java's community" will happen regardless, upgrades to Java 9 and Jigsaw will be slow, much slower than to Java 8. Consider that there are companies still on Java 6 and 7 and both have reached end of life. Along with an ecosystem of libraries that still maintain backwards compatibility. If you're going to go through this migration pain, the benefit / cost ratio has to be worth it. Jigsaw has to solve big problems that Java developers face, to convince the community it's worth it, because projects and libraries have to be changed to support it, risking a very unhealthy fragmentation in that process.