Even when ROS started, we already knew a lot of better ways to build software. The problem is the primary ROS contributor was/is a hybrid robotics engineer + s

Even when ROS started, we already knew a lot of better ways to build software. The problem is the primary ROS contributor was/is a hybrid robotics engineer + software developer, which meant their colleagues were more likely of "closed, vendor firmware toolchains are normal" et al. norms, which meant their community hadn't internalized a lot of those solutions. And this isn't to bash different types of devs -- god knows even leading edge software practices have all kinds of gaps -- but is to say that few people can be 100% in multiple hard things, all at once.