Even when the maintenance is short term, there is also optimization for making the expected type of changes quick and/or easy to perform, something that appears particularly hit or miss with language specific problems: having to fit monad square pegs into typeclass round holes when two libraries need to be used together, unexpectedly needing a significant increase of sophistication and/or boilerplate to support a generalization that should be small, finding a compromise between conflicting preludes or incompatible extensions.

The thing to optimize for is letting experts communicate with each other clearly and concisely. I’m only going to be a newcomer to a system for a short time, and any work while I'm ramping up is not going to be very valuable.