Note: I am not an Acquia PM. I am just someone who sent in a few core patches over the last 11 years.<p>When I got aboard Drupal <i>core</i> was a very lightweight CMS. Infinitely hackable, yeah, if you go and hack core. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Time flies, years pass, and contrib modules happen because users want to click in a browser and not hack core. CCK. Views. All that jazz. Maybe your core is still lightweight but surely not your whole site. Comes Drupal 7, we move some of that into core. Core near collapses under the tech debt incurred. Remember the issue &quot;Field attach API integration for entity forms is ungrokable&quot; reported by the ... field API maintainer. Opsie. So the core developers try to decrease that tech debt and move towards something they found desirable. That&#x27;s how Drupal 8 came to be.<p>Dissing Acquia for core when the chief architect of everything wrong with Drupal 8 (who have basically pulled a fast one over the community in an ingenious breach of process) is not working for Acquia is pointless. There are quite a number of things you could diss Acquia for, there&#x27;s no doubt, but core is hardly one of them. In fact, they paid Wim Leers to undo as much of the performance damage -- by introducing vast amounts of caching -- as possible.