I'm a career programmer too, that's actually looked at some of the recent Core releases, and I can tell you that there's been maybe only a handful of lines of code added to Core in the last year or two.
A. Handful. Of. Lines. In. Over. A. Years. Time.
So let's don't over-glorify these so called developers and put them up on some sort of pedestal. If they had only coded that much in a business world white collar desk job setting, they'd be fired by now for being over-paid slackers. [ ... ]
after 6 years of development, Bitcoin Core is pretty much complete and solid at this point. With the exception of increasing block size, and maybe a few other little things, there's very little left for the Core developers to actually do. So they're basically just downshifted into long term maintenance mode at this point, which anyone can do on the side for a few hours a week.
For one thing, development has been stalled over the last year by the feud between Gavin and the small-blockians. Gavin has coded and tested BIP101 (the only one of those BIPs that has been implemented, AFAIK) several months ago, but has not been allowed to put it into the core.
But, apart from that, a good software developer is not one who makes lots of changes. The best way to increase the block size was coded by Satoshi in 2010, and it is a one-line patch. Blockchain voting is a significant but pointless complication, with many things that could go wrong (in the code and its operation). Too bad that Gavin had to add it for BIP101 in order to appease the ideologues.
The problem with Greg is that he does not really like Satoshi's design, and has his own strong ideas on how bitcoin should be. He has been pushing for that vision for a couple of years at least; and now that he has the power, he is bent in implementing it.
The Core devs certainly are not in "maintenance" mode. Just the SW proposal is a major redesign of a data structure that iis shared by tens of thousands of users and hundreds pf independent applications. One should not be adding all those new features to a production system whose users and app developers are still struggling to cope with. In fact, with their plans for the "fee market" and the off-chain processing, they are in full "retargeting" mode One should not try to do a major redesign of the
functionality, like the fee market, without knowing whether it will work or not.
Greg may be a good cryptographer and programmer, but he is not a good software developer. In fact, it seems that he does not know what that means, and does not want to know ...
