There is another force at work here... If you do achieve a "clean simple X" and manage to resist over time all temptation to add cruft; if your "X" really is cl

There is another force at work here... If you do achieve a "clean simple X" and manage to resist over time all temptation to add cruft; if your "X" really is clean simple and above all found useful by some people, then after a while it starts to look like a dead project. No new "features". Not many bugs left to fix that bother people. Sufficient means to plug in additional/variant functionality that real users need. No need to change the codebase, and not much more to say about it. So to a non-user - perhaps evaluating it with a view to use - it looks very much like a moribund piece of work. The continual adding of cruft is (partially, at least) driven by a need to be seen adding new Hot Sauce all the time.