I feel this comes down to the four freedoms and specifically "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (f

I feel this comes down to the four freedoms and specifically "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1)". In this article it still is clear that this is what both the developers want to provide and the users want to get, however, the disconnect (and the main discussion there) is between what is the most favorable form to study and change the behavior - for some people it's the original C++ code, which gives more power and access to everything, but for others it would be a limited but simpler scripting solution with a clear API that makes easy to write a plugin without having to set up a build environment for a platform where (compared to many other popular languages) that can be a real pain.