Indeed, and as a school those 18 months are well worth it, but it is in many ways also 18 months wasted. There is a strong sense of NIH with the Ladybird dev(s), and I wonder if that isn't their whole reason for doing this.

I've seen another team doing something similar, they went through endless rewrite cycles of a major package but never shipped, and eventually the project was axed when they proposed to do it all over again, but this time even better.