Nice article, I hope we can at least take some lessons from it. What is clear is that the over reliance on "rough consensus" is not scaling well, and it is questionable if it ever did. It's next to impossible for what you call "the free user" to follow along with the relevant stuff anymore. Too many forums, too many people trying to capture their audience, and few resources capable of distilling what the respective developer groups want and intend. In my view this makes multiple implementations inevitable. I just hope this doesn't lead to serious breakages down the road that might lead to trust being broken in a serious way.