You seem to be conflating problems and different groups of people that aren't directly related. To clarify some different groups: * The faster-cpython project

You seem to be conflating problems and different groups of people that aren't directly related. To clarify some different groups: * The faster-cpython project, headed by Guido and his team at Microsoft, is continuing fine, most of the low hanging fruit was accomplished by 3.11, further improvements were moved to medium term goals and they were delayed further by the free threaded project which broke assumptions that were made to optimize CPython, they have adapted but it has pushed big optimizations out to later released (think probably 3.15ish) * The free threaded project, initiated by Sam Gross at Meta, is continuing fine, it was never intended to be ready by 3.13, the fact there is even a build officially published is very fast progress. There isn't yet a plan to make it default, depending on the compatibility of the free threaded build it could be a quick transition or a 5+ year switch over. * The PSF, the Steering Council, and the CoC WG are all different groups that have different responsibilities and aren't typically involved in day-to-day choices of committing certain features. * The release manager is a core developer in charge of making the final choice on whether a particular feature is stable or not. It was the 3.13 release manager who decided to revert the new GC which was intended to generally improve performance for non-free threaded builds, which it may still do in a future release with sufficient fine tuning. Now, there are clearly communication issues in areas of the Python community, but there is also a lot of people getting on with great work and improvements and communicating fine.