Sure, I wish the Bitcoin reference implementation were a little more modular and a little less monolithic.

I wish we had Bitcoin node mods. Little git patches you could apply to compatible versions of the core implementation. We've seen a couple of git patches here and there for things (some of the ones I was most interested in were actually merged) and I think we could see a lot of that. "Hey users are finding this patch quite popular, so let's merge it"

To help bridge a gap here, it would be similar to a Minecraft mod launcher, but because it's C and not Java, it would have to compile your choices, but that would then get you an extra likely often silly little widget that makes playing with your node fun and importantly, but probably less often, something essential that eventually gets merged into the reference implementation anyway.

I believe this makes sense because core developers are already specializing in different aspects of the codebase anyway, so if those aspects were modular components, the workflow wouldn't be all too different from what it already is. I also believe it might result in less developer burnout, because instead of yelling at a dev, users could just patch the undesirable on their own system and then maybe theres a dashboard somewhere that informs everyone of what patches are popular.