Unfortunately, the context starts getting lost as we get deeper into discussion threads like this, but originally, I brought up GTK stewardship because I felt that the top few comments in this thread started to conflate the various projects developed by the GNOME organization. The original HN post was about Mutter, and the first few comments in this reply chain were about software being customizable, etc. Those could've been about whether it's okay or not for Mutter to lose flexibility. But, the one I replied to started complaining about software "imposing limitations on the rest of the ecosystem".

That's when and why I decided to point out that there are different kinds of software projects, and they have different goals and priorities. It's like the old "library vs. application" code: libraries are generic and reusable, and should be written as such, whereas applications are specific and focused.

I brought up GTK simply as an example of a "library project", for which critique of its reusability is warranted, as a counter-example to Mutter, which is an application. Complaining about Mutter's effect on "the ecosystem" is silly. It wouldn't make any less sense to complain about XTerm's effect on the ecosystem by it not supporting Wayland. Anybody in their right mind would just say "So, use one of the other 10,000 terminal emulators in Wayland instead of XTerm"--and rightly so. But, because Mutter is a GNOME project, and GTK is also a GNOME project, I think that people lose focus on what they're talking about.

I did engage with you about GTK because it's interesting, but my point in bringing up GTK was specifically to say "Yeah, those complaints might make sense if we were talking about GTK, but since we're talking about Mutter, they do not." to the comment I replied to.

Your perspective is more clear now. But I disagree.

The article was not about Mutter exclusively. It explained Mutter dropping X11 made GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments. And GNOME Shell would be tied to Mutter even if the article didn't mention it.

Mutter is a library. GNOME is not the only desktop environment which uses it. I don't know if the Pantheon developers wanted to drop X11. But Mutter dropping X11 imposes this limitation on Pantheon.

Your claim the Transmission discussion was not about GTK was incorrect by the way. The GNOME developer said they hadn't decided if GTK would deprecate GtkStatusIcon. The Transmission developer requested GTK make an abstraction. The last comments were a GNOME developer recommending Transmission change architecture so it could support GNOME and in his words whatever odd desktop people want to use after GTK deprecated GtkStatusIcon.

Libraries and applications are not separate inherently. Apple's application scripting architecture was a great strength when it was more supported for example.