I'm not sure what LibreSSL's thinking was. During heartbleed what the world sorely lacked was a working, well maintained OpenSSL. Had LibreSSL created one of

I'm not sure what LibreSSL's thinking was. During heartbleed what the world sorely lacked was a working, well maintained OpenSSL. Had LibreSSL created one of them their thoughts would have been understandable. What there was no shortage of then or now is opinionated, well maintained maintained crypto libraries. There's nothing wrong with creating a new opinionated crypto library of course, that's how progress is made, but they are like weeds. By breaking backward compatibility that is what LibreSSL created, but in doing that they threw their hat into a highly competitive ring Darwin will sort out by killing almost all of the contestants. But in the opinionated crypto library ring, LibreSSL is a weak entrant. Compared to some of it's competitors it's just a minor polish on OpenSSL, making hardly worth of effort of switching really. This outcome looked inevitable to me.