[hakfoo]

It feels like they should have put more background in the original sin that put Opera on this road.

When they used the Presto engine, that gave them a product they could sell- a unique engine they could license for embedded markets, for example. Remember the Wii ran an Opera derivative. They decided to roll out a Blink-based version (v12->15 transition) and that shot them in the foot in every possible way:

* They no longer had a product they could commercialize for licensing revenue. Why buy Blink from them instead of doing your own Chromium fork for free?

* The Blink version was so feature-poor for years that the power users that loved Opera 12 eventually moved to products like Vivaldi, which felt like it was trying to capture the same spirit. I suspect many of them abandoned Opera's portal services which could have been a revenue stream.

Ironically, I suspect the value of a (maintained) Presto engine would only have risen, especially after Chromium!Edge arrived and furthered the fear of a browser monoculture.