[progval]

Debian didn't "divert engineering resources" to this project. People, some of whom happen to be Debian developers, decided to work on it for their own reasons. If the Reproducible Builds effort didn't exist, it doesn't mean they would have spent more time working on other areas of Debian. Maybe even less, because the RB effort was an opportunity to find and fix other bugs.

[RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u]

Yes, the system is not closed and certainly people may simply not contribute to Debian at all. However, my main point is that reasonable people disagree on the relative importance of RR among other things, so it's not about "want[ing] non-reproducible builds" even if one has unlimited resources, but rather wanting RR, but not at the expense of X, where X differs from person to person.

[robertlagrant]

"It's possible to disagree on whether a feature is worth doing" is technically true, but why is it worth discussing time spent by volunteers on something already done? People do all sorts of things in their free time; what's the opportunity cost there?