It’s becoming a reoccurring theme to see some amazing work been done for blender and people getting excited about it, only for it to get abandoned, and the reason is almost always the same.
THE REVIEW PROCESS
Since the review process is not some automated testing, but rather relies on other human beings, it is necessary to avoid falling into the same trap over and over again.
There are 100s of people who contribute to blender but only a handful of reviewers.
There are guidelines for contributing to blender, but I guess not all people have taken the time to read them, one very important point is buried deep inside these guidelines:
People tend to fall into the trap of starting a new branch and working there alone for a couple months/years, and when it’s time for review they dump the whole branch on the reviewer expecting it to be automatically accepted.
The current and previous happenings in the sculpt mode, the fracture modifier, and other projects are good examples.
One of the projects that initially fall into the same trap but managed to come out of it is the first iteration of “everything nodes” when Jacques Lucke was working alone for quite some time before going with the approach of “1 small step at a time of geometry nodes”
Another example is Lukas stockner and his work on principled BSDF V2
Quote from his devtalk thread:
Instead of working in the
principled-v2branch, which had ballooned into a massive changeset and would have grown even larger, the new approach is to do development in themainbranch in chunks. Through the previous work in the branch, the overall direction and plan for the new Principled node is clear enough that we can do it this way instead of constantly going back and tweaking previous changes.
TLDR; My advice for future contributors, don’t branch off for too long and keep your PRs small.
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