What you see as a thriving community, others might see as a fragmented market. I don't know if this makes sense, but it feels like the multiple distributions and overlapping projects trades off deep development for broad development.
Maybe it's the inevitable result of everybody scratching their own itch and doing what they can do, or maybe it's a sign of a community that can't work together.
When you destroy the nest for these dev groups, there will be no more software for a fancy distro to package.
So uneducated outside views matter more than the communities themselves?
> multiple distributions and overlapping projects trades off deep development for broad development
So volunteers are supposed to - I don't know - know better, stop working on what they want to work on, and coordinate? And it's the fault of these volunteers that there's "fragmentation"?
You think this is a zero-sum game, and that volunteers are the equivalent of workers at a business who're dividing their energy amongst competing projects instead of working together. That's both incredibly naive of you and also incredibly presumptuous.
On the other hand, there is the problem that work in one project can and should be usable in another, but when that doesn't happen, that's just because that's how the Linux communities are sometimes.