> If only they would have had the benefit of you being around to do all that work with your glorious hindsight.

They didn't need me; plenty of repositories doing signed packages existed well before npm was created.

Which is why I likened them to a bunch of kids - they didn't look around at how the existing repos were designed, they just did the first thing that popped into their head.

On the other hand, they did the actual work when nobody else did. It's so easy to take potshots, when you've never done anything consequential enough for the results to matter as much as they do for npm.