On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 9:12 PM Stefan Monnier wrote: > Can we just agree that both are important and that it can be hard to > know beforehand which consideration should dominate? > I'd agree to that. But this is not "beforehand", there are really large projects out there. Given a tree a tree structure such as a file system that can have very many nodes, not having any means to take advantage of that structure tree-ness (as project.el clearly doesn't: see the protocol of project-files and the lack of sub-projects) is going to be a hard limitation. Monorepos are really popular in many businesses and many of these are large and/or getting larger. It does makes sense to start simple, but ignoring scale rarely yields the "desired behaviour" unless that behavior is waiting forever. Example: Git "started simple" then grew sparse checkouts, shallow clones, worktrees. You don't _have_ to use these features, but when you do need them, it's very good that they are there.