Yes--it was bleak. Getting tired of watching people run into sharp corners in the process of that was part of why I got involved with trying to fix it up, mysel

Yes--it was bleak. Getting tired of watching people run into sharp corners in the process of that was part of why I got involved with trying to fix it up, myself. There were some dumb (but common in informally-organized OSS...) reasons it malingered. Most of them are still problems (though a few have improved or are slowly moving towards it). A lot of the fixes entail investments in improving leverage of time spent on the installer. Better automated testing, more organizational structure/memory/accountability, etc. But those issues wouldn't have been enough headwind to drag the situation out like it did if there was always one obvious straightforward politically-acceptable solution from day-1 that just needed to get implemented.