Institutional knowledge, and leadership, is indeed critical. The knowledge of a codebase can be re-bootstrapped, and its future can be re-conceived, but actually providing leadership is another story. I think there's one person on the SQLite team besides D. R. Hipp who can provide that leadership, but I'm not sure about business leadership, though who am I to speculate, when I don't really know any of them. All I can say is that from outside looking in, SQLite looks pretty solid, and libSQL seems unfunded.