I know I'm biased but Core 4 (and similar) rub me the wrong way – measuring individual developers as the atomic unit IMO is always meaningless. It's a proxy for organizational health but not directly correlated.

Especially now with AI, what do metrics like "prs/engineer" even mean when you have background agents open/reviewing/releasing PRs without human intervention? what is the right unit for measuring health of the org?

FWIW I write a lot more about "why not existing frameworks" in depth in the full paper.

Initiatives are defined specifically as non-productive, technical leverage-producing initiatives that affect the org's health as a whole and are often left behind. For example, we recently ran an initiative around feature flag cleanups and full rollouts that we tracked religiously during our weekly OpEx review – without which we probably would not have had the same success with that cleanup initiative.

I understand your cynicism with "yet another framework" but (and I know I'm biased) this framework is intimately tied to ops reviews as a mechanism for both measurement and organizational change.