I am convinced that Vim's greatest asset and risk is Bram Moolenar. Bram is a talented, experienced developer, and I commend him for creating Vim. But he is the only person with write access to Vim's codebase. The primary author of NeoVim is Thiago de Arruda. Thiago tried to work with Bram, but was rejected.[1] Patches similar to Thiago's have been proposed before, but were also rejected.[2] It is for this reason that Thiago has forked Vim, and I wish him luck.
It's important to remember that everyone involved is trying to improve Vim as they see it. I think this is a prime example of how the benevolent dictatorship model can fail.
Do users mind that in your words Moolenar is a risk to vim, though? Are people specifically interested in the advancement of vim or just more generally in the progress of vim-like text editors, in which case they can happily switch to neovim if it becomes better than vim?
That is not the results of his labor. That is the means by which he achieves those results. There is an enormous difference. You're assessing the technical state of his project, and confusing that with its actual impact on the world. They are two different things.
I call him a "talented developer" because he has successfully developed and maintained (for two decades) a stable piece of software that is the base infrastructure on millions (billions?) of computer systems around the world. Millions of other developers rely on his work for their own work. I'll grant that maybe he has done this despite his engineering skills. But his software is a success by any reasonable measure, and I think it takes talent to achieve that.
I love code. I get an enormous pleasure of well engineered code. I appreciate code for its own sake. But code also serves a purpose, and I refuse to believe that someone whose code is so enormously successful somehow did so by accident, without talent.
It's important to remember that everyone involved is trying to improve Vim as they see it. I think this is a prime example of how the benevolent dictatorship model can fail.
1. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ
2. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/-4pqDJfHCsM%...