I've been noticing a pattern in the free-software world. Product A becomes a flagship implementation of something. Sendmail for smtp, Apache for http and so on. These are early implementors, lots of people get behind the project, a hundred different paths are taken. In the mean-time there are lots of experimenting, tweaking, and reworking to the entire suite/stack for that something, which get rolled into the origina…
That is often the case, but have you seen the Asterisk code base? It's amazing that it compiles, let alone runs for more than 5 minutes.
How is this different than what I said? In my example/metaphor Asterisk is the crufty lumbering giant..