Comment by jerf

It's the Cycle of Bloat.

    1. Develop tool. It's small and fast and minimal! Woo!
    2. It's easy to modify because it's so small! Woo!
    3. Look, there's a budding ecosystem of packages! Woo! (Let's
       not talk about the fact the packages exist precisely because
       the original product wasn't big enough.)
    4. Oh dear, some of them conflict, a lot of them suck. Well, 
       here's some winners, let's pull them into the core. Now the
       base system is that much better! Woo!
    5. Repeat 3 and 4 a few times.
    6. Crap, this tool is all bloated and slow. I'm going to go
       create a small, fast, minimalist solution!

Repeat indefinitely.

See also: "minimalist web framework", "minimalist Linux distribution", "minimalist programming language".