Very interesting observation. Perhaps the community's reluctance to change (with some of these large open-source projects) is the same kind of dynamic you get

Very interesting observation. Perhaps the community's reluctance to change (with some of these large open-source projects) is the same kind of dynamic you get within large multi-national corporations where not only are people within those organizations reluctant to make large changes, but once you've reached a certain scale it's just plain difficult to make changes happen. My hunch is change at web-scale (when you care about community adoption) can only happen when it's done in a thoughtful, incremental fashion.