@cas Oh, thxthx for the careful response! 
So first of all, I did not say or imply that complexity is a completely or even a net negative thing. After all, there’s a reason we’re all in the FOSS communities in some form or another, and it’s how it allows anyone to participate in diverse ways of achieving similar goals, then finding common ground and sharing efforts, as you mention with pmOS. Very irregularly, rather chaotically (for better! or worse!), but it does happen. The main problems I got are with the margin of improvement for cooperation (via standardization, shared codebases and stacks, etc), as well with how the politics behind it all are translated into choice complexity for the newcomer — and thus liability that they ideally shouldn’t have. Opinionated projects are very much positive if not inevitable (otherwise you’re stuck with the contradictory goals of #neutrality and #universality, potentially grinding things to a halt or forcing to change course), and I’m not gonna nod along the “just do a single project” fallacy. It’s just that I think the community should accept and embrace collaboration, tradeoffs and consensus when it makes sense… so it’s good to know that there’s already some momentum towards that!
…hopefully everyone will indeed do their best. I know how discouragement and conflict can arise even between well-meaning parts (communication, ideals, personal lives…), let alone when not everyone’s on the same page (
). But yeah, if that’s the case I do believe governance and results will follow and be much more empowering than just handing over that responsibility to Google or some other BDFL instead.
(P.S.: yeah I know the Linux stack consensus isn’t absolute, the “somewhat” wasn’t just about fd.o!
)