Rich has a fairly strict development approach and wants to personally review and approve all changes to the core. There are complaints about that process, and that's fair. But as far as I have seen, most large, successful projects have similar personalities leading them (Stallman, Linus, Larry Wall, Guido...).

Finally, I should add -- if what you are looking for is software freedom... then you should absolutely consider using a Lisp like clojure. Lisp's give you the power to control your language through macros and non-core libraries. Unlike other languages, you do not need a core development team to make language changes for you. Perhaps this is why clojure is so powerful... because the core process issues you have heard about are not actually that important, and in fact the language itself enables substantially more software freedom than perhaps you are giving it credit for.

fwiw, six can easily be vendored into a project to avoid the technical external dependency. that is how we manage it for kafka-python.

But that's an interesting point re mining pools. Do you have any links to more information about how they drastically changed dynamics?

  [Nodes] vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
  valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
  them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

You're complecting. In the real world of Clojure, you could simply define a protocol and provide different implementations of "garnish".

Anyways, always fun to read benchmarks. I hope kafka-python makes someone out there smile. That's the best benchmark in my book.

This setup may seem odd, but but it has historically been used to provide some protection against labels "screwing" artists - b/c although a label takes the sound recording rights and therefore controls royalty payments back to artists for the recording [if any -- after recoupment, etc], the artist typically retains their own publishing rights and can license those separately for $$ not subject to their label deal (though subject to cuts from societies, and their individual deals with publishers etc). This opens up new revenue streams for artists to get paid outside the control of their label: by radio stations/bars/restaurants via PROs, or in sync-right deals for placement in movies or on TV.