It's genuinely difficult to avoid being condescending given the type of conversations I've been having about this. For what it's worth, it's not aimed at you sp

It's genuinely difficult to avoid being condescending given the type of conversations I've been having about this. For what it's worth, it's not aimed at you specifically. At any rate, I'm happy to ditch the snark, and talk about something concrete. I'm not sure what your suggestion is - I could separate out the CPAN projects (is there any way to do this programmatically?), and see if they show a greater decline in commits than non-CPAN Perl projects. But that wouldn't settle the issue, because I would still need some way to distinguish between projects that have decreasing commits because developer impetus is petering out as projects become more unwieldy, and projects that have decreasing commits because they are nearing "completion". I would also want to compare the results with an equivalent set of Python or Ruby libaries - choosing an appropriate set would be tricky.