And yeah - a lot of fedi is built on spur of the moment inspiration without much planning on the long term. Sometimes it works out (like pixelfeed and the other related projects) and sometimes the passion of one (or small group) of devs just isn't enough.
Lemmy is pretty good example (from the other side of the scale) as well - we're at version 0.18.4 - and the devs are pretty hostile.