mutual dependency vs. one-way dependency maybe, participant behavior vs. environment behavior, relationships vs. language

Yea I think its a bit of a paradox, everyone has taken for granted that its less risky on the L2 because the L1 is what's notoriously consensus driven... ignoring that its a loose-consensus on L2 that's inherently more fragile

Incentives are likely a factor in this narrative remaining undisputed, there's service layers to offer in L2 stacks that influence the implementations, there's not really any services that coupled closely to the L1. The Lightning implementations are all very modular, the bolts necessitate it, yet they all ship as part of value-added ecosystems (even if they're optional)

Likely, but even Debian, RedHat, Arch and their children is more distributed than Bitcoin is at this stage.... all generally dividing up the same hardware.

My issue with Core is that, due to its legacy, very few even think about distribution and are never forced to make a decision. That default distribution had made it a politburo more than it is an implementation, leaving both ossifists and expressionists dissatisfied.

Archiving it would at least shake that up, even if it was a 1:1 Team/NGO migration to a new repo under a new name achieving a similar share of update distribution, Core loyalists would stand to benefit the most in affirming such a mandate.

This has become apparent with the Nostr NIP's repo already too, the repo is a politburo for the distribution channel that is nostr-tools and dictates by default how any number of things are done. This despite really only a handful of the NIP's resembling a level of network-wide consensus.