[barrkel]

"Batteries included" is almost always better than "level playing field" because of network effects. The larger the set of common types / protocols available, the higher up the abstraction stack interfacing between two unrelated third party components can be. Minimalist environments have to pay taxes in the form of glue code and adapters for different ways of representing the same underlying concepts (though the costs are reduced in duck-typed languages). Even worse things happen when you try and use two third-party components and they share different versions of a common dependency - sometimes there's no easy way out.

Inferior approaches sometimes do get baked in to standard libraries. Having a culture of versioning, deprecating, migrating, is better IMO. But it's even better again to do a really good job first time around. Not easy, but I didn't say it was!