I thought the description of the problems with LaTeX architecture was pretty concrete and convincing. Knuth is no doubt a genius, I admire him as much as anyone

I thought the description of the problems with LaTeX architecture was pretty concrete and convincing. Knuth is no doubt a genius, I admire him as much as anyone, but he does his work in a certain niche in a very isolated setting and probably doesn't have that much experience doing software engineering work on larger projects and with other people. For me, one of the big lessons from working on projects for a few years with other people, was that you should avoid taking big technical risks on non-toy projects as much as possible. I am sure most people reading this have seen projects that are valuable in themselves, but where someone at some point thought he can at the same time create a better web framework / better database / better encryption library etc. and now this valuable piece of software depends in thousands of places on a very peculiar solution that only the author (often having some authority at the company/project, a CTO or a valued programmer) knows and only the author likes - it ended up not getting any traction or wasn't even extracted from the core project and presented to the world. In projects that will live for many years and will need to be maintained by many people, it is important to remember that the vitality of the project will be proportional to the amount of people A) being able and B) willing to use the tools the project is built with, so it is important to use already estabilished tools, pick less-critical projects for experiments, always extract any new infrastructure pieces right from the start into a separate project, document it, see whether other people want to use it etc. That's why I think LaTeX rewritten in simple C would be valuable and what the author has written is a testament to what I have written above - maybe we would not end up with a mix of WEB/Pascal, C and bash scripts if the original TeX/LaTeX was a program more people understood and could easily modify.