[danmaz74]

I understand your points, but I would suggest to consider a different point of view:

1. When you're experimenting with a seriously new technology or approach, the most likely outcome is that you'll fail, especially at the market adoption level. Being able to conduct your experiment at a lower cost is still a net positive, except for one point: having invested less, you are more likely to abandon the experiment early, because of the sunken costs fallacy. That doesn't necessarily need to be the case.

2. Developer velocity/productivity is something that you can demonstrate - as long as the difference is consistent, like, not 10% faster, but 80% faster. Other social/political concerns are a different thing, but really, gaining market adoption based only on those is VERY difficult - if that wasn't the case, I don't think we would be having this discussion at all, because Firefox would have a much higher penetration.

So, the point is, how is having a completely separate codebase going to help with having success? It could attract a higher number of idealistic developers, but the additional work required is very likely to negate that advantage.