Well, in the first place the Cinepaint maintainer, Robin Rowe, wasn't a developer. He kind of inherited the tarball with the 16 bit patches, then tried to drum

Well, in the first place the Cinepaint maintainer, Robin Rowe, wasn't a developer. He kind of inherited the tarball with the 16 bit patches, then tried to drum up financial support, without being able to actually maintain the codebase. There was one other developer interested in the codebase, but since Robin never really made releases, their work never really got out. And... Sorry, but "if bitdepth == 8 then, else if bitdepth == 16 all through the codebase just wouldn't have been maintainable for anybody. Then a Scottish university donated a tarball of a research project to the Cinepaint project so then Robin had to maintain two completely different codebases, one which was presented as the successor of the first one. Then Robin decided that the real problem was the antiquated autohell build system, so he decided that having waf, scons and cmake build systems was going to draw in developers. (The blogs announcing that aren't on cinepaint.org anymore, maybe the wayback machine still has them?) That didn't work either, of course, and nothing much happened after that. Cinepaint.org became more and more vandalized, nobody put money in the project, and, well, seeing I'm the Krita maintainer, I probably should stop reminiscing, and go back to coding :-)