Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.

They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.

This is why it's so important to have data. So far I have not seen any evidence of a 'Cambrian explosion' or 'industrial revolution' in software.

If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.

This doesn’t even include the XFree86 CVS commit history and older, which accounts for most of the code in X.org. Some of those people may actually be dead now.

>AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers.

There are 38 people with 100+ commits, which obviously counts as a major contributor.