[aegiso]

Thing is, software doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Perhaps it's worth considering that maybe the reason that checklists aren't the norm in the FOSS "meritocracy" is that they hinder progress, for a certain value of progress. Maybe there was a stealth project that could have been OpenSSL, developed with scrict adherance to checklists, but OpenSSL won because it didn't have that burden? I suspect this applies more broadly to startups, too.

Maybe checklists are a silent killer in the natural selection of the software ecosystem, and that's why so much of our software is tripping over peacock feathers?

Just a thought.