Google is not a person. Google is a transhuman organization with over 60,000 individual consciousnesses taking part in it. Google can do more than one thing at a time (if their management infrastructure doesn't require a single person to approve every action).

Well. Even a single person can work on more than one task in a day. But much like a single person, the Android team has limited time and energy to allocate.

In my perfect world, the whole Android team spends the next three months doing a bug bash and releasing an Android 6 where I reliably get Hangouts messages and don't have to reboot 2-3 times a week. If some of the Android team is working on stripping down the OS for IoT devices, less time is being spent on that hypothetical bug bash.

Of course this is all moot because fixing bugs doesn't seem to be a priority for them regardless; adding stickers is far more important. :)

Java for low-power devices. This is some high-level trolling by Google!

There is not a single mention of Java at the Brillo announcement.

Irrelevant but flush your biases and assumptions down to the toilet. Java can statically compile to microcontroller architectures with minimal runtime footprint. Stop blaming the languages, blame the runtime implementations.

I'm amazed Android 5 wasn't a trainwreck considering the scope of changes and speed of development.

5.0 was pretty bad on some devices (I got lucky with the Moto X, but if I was a Nexus owner I'd have been really annoyed). 5.1 is massively improved, but it's a pity it took them an extra 6+ months to roll it out.

I'd love it if Google took more control off the carriers, and took responsibility into their own hands. If Apple can roll out updates in a couple of days, Google should be able to do much better than they have been doing.

Here is the dirty secret: Carriers are sold all kinds of creeping horror to put in their handsets. This badware collects all kinds of information on you. As with a lot of badware, the quality is crap. The engineering is optimized for cost, not quality. So updates take forever.

This is why carriers are highly resistant to allowing Google to manage the software on phones. This is why Nexus handsets are mostly sold direct. This is why Google was tempted into exploring being an MVNO.