Not really a relevant thing to talk about here, but I find there's this trend in Linux ecosystem that people are explicitly implementing more and more policies

Not really a relevant thing to talk about here, but I find there's this trend in Linux ecosystem that people are explicitly implementing more and more policies on the code level instead of making flexible abstractions and data-fying user decisions. I'm not talking about exposing user-friendly configuration options, but is about mechanism-over-policy. The presenter mentioned "use-case over mechanism/policy", but, given a good mechanism, use-cases are just policies. Although I do understand the value of the current approach in the industry (i.e. MVP), I think it does come with a cost - you get a large corpus of low density code that gives a lot of surprises in many different corners. Redhat-funded projects are really leading this trend (I'm looking at you systemd, the project). If you read their code, you'll instantly notice that they are becoming more and more labor-intensive, and less and less hacker-friendly. We are losing smartness for the sake of grunting. Some might think Wayland is a smart approach, but it's actually not. It's mostly just pure grunting - a showcase of large engineering horsepower. It's a large-scale refactoring & optimization of the modern day X11 desktop ecosystem. Everything works in the exact same way, but things happen in slightly different places, and some features are banned by policy (arbitrarily outlined by wayland devs). These missing special features now need to be implemented explicitly as "protocols". Now, I really want to ask - where are we heading here? Are we really stepping forward? I don't think so. We're just going side ways.