I think that you're making a good point, and at the same time I think that tasking MS Devs with rewriting parts of their ecosystem is a bit of a minefield for a

I think that you're making a good point, and at the same time I think that tasking MS Devs with rewriting parts of their ecosystem is a bit of a minefield for any company, but especially Microsoft. Long-term they need people to make good contributions to the ecosystem and I imagine it would be hard for third parties to sustain interest if it was a known risk that MS would rewrite whatever they were contributing. I think you're spot on about the ecosystem being as important (or even more important?) than the core technology, and I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts on how to encourage such an ecosystem.