[lsaferite]

I think this is a legacy from how Magento became popular. They didn't target developers, they targeted merchants and had an amazing marketing drive to get the foothold. This drove adoption from the merchant side. As a developer I would have never pushed Magento as from the early betas I was horrified at things like the EAV system.

The core platform should be one thing, and the features should all be 100% modular. If you want the all-singing all-dancing version then you could just have a config tool on the website to generate your specific bundle of core + features. Decoupling the features from the core allows the feature set so shift over time to track merchant expectations while still maintaining a solid platform to build upon.