[zeroxfe]

I don't understand why this is a problem. It's not uncommon to see multi-decade old systems refactored for extensibility and maintainability every once in a while. What worked when it was initially designed won't work forever, and it's hard to make users lives better if the maintainers can't make their own lives better.

(BTW, this isn't "shipping their org chart.")

[aeonik]

I thought Conway's law was fairly prolific.

Though, the closer it is to a true a "law", then the closer GP's comment approaches a tautology.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[tjpnz]

Did it ever work? I remember having to write some pretty gnarly hacks to work around the broken Python code protoc would barf out. Working outside of Go and perhaps Java/Kotlin I've little faith that they're not going to break things further.