Development Speed

[xenodasein]

  Over some time now I have been trying to familiarize myself with Emacs
code-base and to follow emacs-devel.  I have an observation I would like to
ask about, because of course I alone can not assess the level of it's validity
as a mere mortal who doesn't have the man-hours spent on Emacs internals.

  Is Emacs developing too fast?  Contributions seem to focus on increasing
code size rather than reducing it, on adding features and not on
"paying technical debt"?  Maybe these tendencies oscillate healthily over
years and I only observed a period of the former.

  Especially the graphical parts seem to suffer from high-coupling and
low-cohesion?  Where for example the Neovim project seems to have the ability
to arbitrarily change what GUI implementation it uses. This mail seems to have
the same observation about GUI situation:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-12/msg01866.html

  I couldn't find a "milestones" type of guide, and do not know of future
plans except the ones in TODO file, so maybe there is something regarding to
this topic?

  Large-scale refactoring would make it possible to pursue TODO list items
like "Emacs as word processor" or "Concurrency", or allow us to use C17?

Thoughts?