Thank you for this pertinent observation. I must confess that after examining all the failed attempts at "writing modern TeX" when I got upset with the TeX pac

Thank you for this pertinent observation. I must confess that after examining all the failed attempts at "writing modern TeX" when I got upset with the TeX packages I wanted to write, I got despaired that so many people had tried and failed before. NTS is probably the worst example, since "rewriting software X using language Y" is something I do not really understand nor support (especially when language Y is only "felt" superior to the original language, using only non-theoretically-backed dogmas such as "object coolness" to support these assertions). Lout is certainly a more pertinent example, but there are also others, including Microsoft Word. After examining the possibilities of doing something usable, and reading great books (most importantly Bringhurt's Elements of Typograhic Style) we felt that we could do something different, and that the world really needed a different tool. And right now, Patoline is already different, because we are not serving any master. The idea is the following: imagine you have two users, God and Baal. God wants a forward-compatible tool that he can write stable rules for the universe with. Baal wants bleeding-edge experimental features to be added all the time, and compile his documents to web pages for ever-changing standards. When we are ready to release Patoline 1.0, both will be able to combine the modules into their favorite tool: God will be able to write something that will work in saecula, and Baal will have his fancy stuff.