> I believe that we're moving from something unsustainable to something sane
It is only unsustainable because the FF team chose to make the process more difficult than it had to be. This is how what you are saying sounds:
1. We didn't want to break plugins so we involved addon developers
2. The process takes so long that it takes 18 months to introduce any new code
3. Since 2 was so slow we decided instead we would PERMANENTLY break plugins with no way to ever fix them
Put another way: things were taking too long because of Mozilla's own self-imposed guidelines so the Firefox team had no choice but to PERMANENTLY break addons that will never be fixable by design because the Firefox team was so concerned about temporarily breaking plugins. This is double speak. The predicate (3) contradicts the subject (1).
After it was pointed out how ludicrous this sound the caveat is added that this had to be done in the name of security, performance, and privacy. At what point did security and performance become more important than an open platform and why? Numerous addons exist solely to provide privacy by blocking fingerprinting, stopping redirects, providing control over cross-site requests (RequestPolicy Continued), super-cookie safeguards (BetterPrivacy), and these options are no longer available. How are these privacy enhancing features being added now that the option has been removed since the goal is privacy?
The whole thing is hard to take at face value when everything seems to be self-contradicting (sans performance).