[favourable]

I personally love being singularly focused on a passion project / labor of love, and try not to spread myself thinly across multiple projects. I have recently given up research-and-development type scenarios where I tinker with new toy languages, frameworks, tooling, etc

I mean it's important to explore and toy with new ideas, but the real quest is to stick with a project and see it out until its death. The caveat being, the project could end up being another ephemeral flash in the pan (depending on what timescale you cast as ephemeral).

I try to build & contribute to projects that will outlive me. Think of all your code commits on Github or other projects: you essentially write code that could last centuries, because you're contributing to something bigger than 'you' or your own pet project. This is why I love open source - it doesn't forget.

[ehnto]

The catch I find with using fun new tools on side-projects is that you can confuse excitement in the build for excitement in the project. I can also execute far, far quicker with my preferred toolset, which is a collection of more pragmatic approaches I've collected over the years.

There's room for exploratory projects, but I think if you're taking the actual project seriously you should do it with stuff you're comfortable in.