FWIW, I think the reason I'm conflicted is probably a similar reason to why you made a separate new thing. Overcoming the inertia and ways of doing things, or proposing widespread changes, often doesn't go down well with existing maintainers – for very valid reasons. I probably wouldn't want to go into the grep project and suggest rearchitecting it, and I can see why the Ruff developers didn't want to go into projects like Flake8 and Pylint to do the same.

But that doesn't stop me from feeling that there were things lost in this process and wishing for a better outcome.

A huge advantage of going your own way is that you don't need to address an audience you think are just wrong.

When this happens periodically (rather than, every other week) you also get the original GNU advantage which is you can revisit an old tool but knowing what you know now, for example today "everybody" has DVCS, and so ripgrep checks for the .gitignore file.

Wait... Did you misunderstand this comment? Or are you saying grep caught up with ripgrep now?

And you think you've done it?