faré the guy who briefly took over asdf development before quitting common lisp entirely to do scheme, or whatever he's doing right now, spent significant amount of time turning asdf from a 10kb file into 3000kb file in order to solve problems that only he himself cared about, or possibly only google cared about because faré worked for google at the time (building portability library that ignored and force-superseded existing solutions, and trying to eliminate corners cases of SAT solving). there was a period where he was harrassing (this is a subjective interpretation of the events, but this is my side) implementors to incorporate his recent asdf changes, that were breaking left and right to the point that multiple common lisp maintainers of multiple common lisps were considering pulling asdf from their repos entirely. things have stabilized, because faré quit and there's no longer volatility. we're at a point where there's just no concensus about relying on asdf for anything, and while some people go all in on 30% of available functionality (as opposed to customary 5%), equally many people, the majority, use it as a glorified (load)(load)(load). this is an unfortunate side effect of activist developers in small communities: they can have outsized long term effect on how things are done.