> When you're doing a ground-up rewrite, it makes sense to get the basics working first.
And you do that in alpha phases. You don't replace working software with inferior, incomplete software.
At least, that's what is supposed to happen. I have no idea why people think it's reasonable to downgrade users to a new version that has fewer features and expect the users to use the new, inferior version while waiting for the equivalent features to be restored. I would say that it's greed, the desire to sell new software at lower development costs for more profit, but since the FOSS community has been one of the worst offenders in this regard (KDE 4, GNOME 3), I guess it's not that simple. Maybe some other factors are laziness, irresponsibility, and lack of pride in craftsmanship.
And you do that in alpha phases. You don't replace working software with inferior, incomplete software.
At least, that's what is supposed to happen. I have no idea why people think it's reasonable to downgrade users to a new version that has fewer features and expect the users to use the new, inferior version while waiting for the equivalent features to be restored. I would say that it's greed, the desire to sell new software at lower development costs for more profit, but since the FOSS community has been one of the worst offenders in this regard (KDE 4, GNOME 3), I guess it's not that simple. Maybe some other factors are laziness, irresponsibility, and lack of pride in craftsmanship.