I guess the whiggish interpretation is that if each step is an improvement then the cycle represents steady progress, if not arrived at as directly as could be

I guess the whiggish interpretation is that if each step is an improvement then the cycle represents steady progress, if not arrived at as directly as could be hoped. Maybe a cynic says that the extensions are negative-sum, or the rewrite is (either to adopting teams, or to a fragmented wider community.) I'm an optimist, though admittedly entirely ignorant of this project. I think some capacity is sometimes lost when new projects are started with new technologies that don't live up to their predecessors, but that accusations of tool choice being fashion-driven are mostly misplaced. There are real, tangible, frequent improvements, and disruption is probably the price of innovation. And it's a price you can mostly avoid paying if you want to keep using what you're using.