(07-11-2019, 02:29 AM)venam Wrote: While the most common userland tools can be bloated for some usages

Being bloated for a specific use is one thing, what i see happening is little to no care about resources consumption, and this mindset eventually affects the system as a whole.

(07-11-2019, 02:29 AM)venam Wrote: I don't think there's any claim about their reliability or general usefulness.

Fair, what doesn't imply we can't see the lack of those as a problem.

(07-11-2019, 02:29 AM)venam Wrote: You mention extra flags and features, lack of consistency between them, and duplicate behavior, in my opinion that's more of a programmer's moral perception issue than an actual one.

While true, that this isn't a problem per se, the thing is that the system should evolve with some criteria, otherwise you will end with a mess.

(07-11-2019, 02:29 AM)venam Wrote: From my perspective, the problem that rises in popular softwares is that they are gradually partnering with others, creating and adding too much coupling. Coupling is insidious because changing any of the lowest layer will ripple through the whole stack. The more you add coupling and the more the system looks like one rigid piece. My guess is that this is what we see in the partnership of the major DE developers, the freedesktop, etc..

Coupling in the sense of trying to have interoperability or reducing independence?

(07-11-2019, 02:29 AM)venam Wrote: Another one of my guess is that the team working on those softwares are trading technical debt for quick wins of being able to use bleeding edge features. That's the environment we live in today, fast iterations.

True, but i think that this mentality is still "isolated" to its own place, in the sense that the unstable development scenarios always have been this way, while the stable places continues to be stable.