Remember, I come from well outside the Rebol world. The reason I don’t understand is, to a large extent, because this way of reasoning about code is one I’ve never seen before in my life. This is the reason I’m asking so many questions, setting out my opinions, and having these discussions with you… precisely so that I can begin to understand why it is that way.
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Yes, though also remember... 
I'm not advertising anything here...not fit for any purpose, or any use!
(I also didn't make this forum. That was done by @gchiu, and I initially protested it as something that would fall in my lap as yet-another-maintenance-headache. But I found Discourse could be a rather good notebook, with easy wiki-like reorganization features to mean the site wouldn't wind up stale and useless. So I ended up embracing it.)
I first met Carl Sassenrath at a party in Los Angeles. Rebol was not open source at the time. I'm a pretty big believer in Stallman's "Why Software Should Be Free"
(I also believe FSF should flip the acronym as "Foundation for Software Freedom", and that generally "Freedom" should be used where "Free" creates many confusions with "Gratis". But Stallman's idealism/autism makes him convinced that retaking the term "Free" to mean "Freedom" is so inherently logical that putting his thumb on the scale will change how everyone else hears the word.)
Carl had resisted open-sourcing Rebol. Over whiskey at the party's open bar, I lobbied him on the inevitability of developer tools as open source, and that closed-source couldn't be profitable. Much more profit would be opened up by being a steward of a successful open source project.
He said he didn't keep it closed-source to make money, rather that he "didn't want anybody messing with his art." Rebol was his "grand experiment" and he had very specific opinions about what was or wasn't an improvement of it.
Eventually it was open sourced. He came to face the fact he wasn't going to be able to deliver Rebol 3 himself, in the time he had, with the methods he'd been using. He wanted to move on with other things (went to work for Roku, on embedded-C products, closer to his EE background). So now it's in the hands of others.
While Carl and I may disagree about what exactly the artistic vision is, we do agree that it is an art... the medium is unique... and driven by a certain je ne sais quoi of what makes a good or bad decision. A big part of what we both believe is that dependency control is critical, and that a useful implementation can be made and understood without requiring a very advanced toolchain (and that the substrate not be intrinsically obfuscating, see recent xz hack for how important this all is).
The time I can put into the project is not infinite...and I haven't had much time in March (and will likely not have a whole lot in April, either). And I am a semi-retired person who is not paid to do this, so I heavily prioritize whether I'm having fun or not. It can be a real slog at times, and if a novel mechanism doesn't pop up every now and then to renew my interest...I can lose motivation.
I'm grateful that this year started off with cracking some of the rationale for how binding has to work, so thank you for your contributions to that! It gave a boost and a renewed faith that good-enough answers are possible. I've been letting that settle a bit, and sometimes these things take time to shake out vs. being able to finish the design all at one time. So I work on other things--sometimes just what interests me--while experience is gathered to realize where to point the big design questions.
But I don't expect anything to happen overnight. This has been a long haul project which needs a marathon mentality, and so patience is mandatory.
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