> And also in my experience, by the time you've invested the years of effort required to fill in gaps in the public package ecosystem, it's time to move on to the next niche language trend.

This probably depends on the complexity of what you need to do, as well as how well you want to do it.

I've seen people writing their own packages and pieces of systems in months, to typically pretty underwhelming results. However when writing code with tests, proper documentation, getting started guides etc., then what you're saying does sound way more plausible, especially if scope creep of any sorts is also present.

Would you care to comment on what sorts of systems take years to properly develop, though? Because in my experience that could be applicable to very few software projects out there.