It is worth pointing out that when we dropped the interpreter, we only had two or three engineers working on the VM and they had to both develop the JIT and mai

It is worth pointing out that when we dropped the interpreter, we only had two or three engineers working on the VM and they had to both develop the JIT and maintain the interpreter, plus work on the GC, io-layer and other VM features. Without a reason to keep the interpreter (the world was a JIT-friendly place back then), it made no sense to maintain it. But times change, statically compiled environments are more common nowadays (iOS, PlayStation, Xbox, tvOS, watchOS) and with it the need to have dynamic capabilities. To put things in perspective, adding generics to the revived interpreter probably took an engineer that was not familiar with .NET about 4-6 weeks of work.