[tinfoilhatter]

> I’m sure there’s a lot of context I’m missing. But what is the story behind this?

There was a falling out between the Nim core development team and several volunteer compiler developers. The former seemed to be paying more attention to their personal projects, while still desiring to maintain their positions of control and authority over Nim and its direction. The latter group grew increasingly frustrated, the situation became extremely toxic, and ultimately Nim lost several talented compiler developers to the hard fork.

I believe the goal of being incompatible with Nim resulted from the developers involved in the hard fork feeling like the Nim development team had done a poor job of designing certain portions of the language and compiler. I'm pretty sure they ditched the C++ backend, and made some substantial changes to the langauge to bring it more inline with their ideals.

I'm not involved in the development of either project, so a much better source of information would be the Nimskull project's developers themselves and the core Nim development team.