You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar

why would I want to attract bugs? Vinegar keeps them away from me

It isn't even true.

https://xkcd.com/357/

"Head over heels" is another weird idiom. I'm so in love, I'm standing in a normal orientation.

"Head over heels" is actually a corruption of "heels over head".

It's one of those corruptions which flips the meaning (ironically, in this case!) on its head, or just becomes meaningless over time as it's reinterpreted (like "the exception that proves the rule" or "begs the question").

But then you are left with less honey.

Competing with each other would be trying to one-up each other feature-wise, whereas what I have witnessed was things like discussing trade-offs made in different languages and juggling around ideas on if some feature from language A would make sense in language B too.