People complain about fragmentation, but I feel like they are missing the forest for the trees.

In the past if you didn't find something you needed, you'd design your own. Now you just tweak RISC-V.

I mean "12 variants of RISC-V" is actually less fragmentation than "RISC-V and 11 others".

As long as there is a stable core to target, that is all that matters for main stream adoption, and profiles and distros are already there with RVA23.

Sure, but what we saw was most software simply disabled the advanced vendor specific features in ARM, and still only compile for stable code around the core IP.

This is an important phenomena committee consensus couldn't reconcile. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect