[akkartik]

The concrete thing I'm doing and generalizing from boils down to:

* Starting from Lua which seems to have a decent security story;

* Changing a few lines of _safe_ Lua for yourself without introducing new buffer overflows and so on;

* and limiting the reach of those changes to a few thousand people _at most_. (99% of forks won't have even that, thanks to the tyranny of the power law.)

Your comment is very much something I think about. I don't think it's as cut and dried as you make it sound. It seems worth exploring. It seems analogous to doing controlled burns every year to avoid humongous wildfires.