I can come up with architectures which avoid the combinatorial explosion of test cases. Most of these hinge on two pieces of architecture and one of organizatio

I can come up with architectures which avoid the combinatorial explosion of test cases. Most of these hinge on two pieces of architecture and one of organization: 1) Giving drivers ways to expose additional functionality through extensions (a thin pass-through) 2) Giving abstract APIs which allow transformations between the input and the output 3) Having the mess live outside. The maintainer maintains interfaces, but not the exponential explosion of one-of-features and quirks. Examples of such architectures include themable / programmable window managers (e.g. Enlightment/xmonad/etc.), Photoshop/gimp filters/extensions, or EMACS. Whether or not this is a good idea is a different question. I don't have an opinion there. I definitely would have had time playing with something like this as a teenager. I just expect things to work as an adult with adult responsibilities. A lot of this comes down to target audience, resources available, and other questions which I have zero insight into.