Care to name any?

I've seen software that academics write. It's no better than average. It's often cut-and-paste code, or these days AI slop. Software is a means to an end in academia, rarely a product in itself.

TeX

You read my mind...

[delayed]

Anki

> They tend to be very stable, very predictable - and very high quality.

Some of them are, most are not.

Actually, most FOSS stuff is anything but stable or predictable. Instead it is constant treadmill, broken compatibility, and recently, thousand of commits from claude et al.

I did say: "some" - you are correct about "most" (chasing the latest "shiny" pattern, method, infrastructure, etc - constant churn)