@blogdiva @polotek fwiw, Eugen is no longer calling all the shots, @renchap is now making more of the engineering decisions, and having a small team is absolutely not by choice, but instead constrained by funding as noted in the 2022 annual report figures: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/10/annual-report-2022/
Basically you can't hire full-time engineers without money. Each full-time engineer based in Europe costs you about €80k/year on average; folks based in America have much higher salary requirements too.