It's important to get the nuance of this statement right. Consider, for instance, the PSF's mission statement:
> The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
"Facilitate the growth" does not imply that dominance of a certain practice (whether that is use of Python, or adoption of its core principals) is a goal. So you have an incentive for the PSF to say "our international community is growing at a sufficient rate" and focus instead on "advancing the language," which may or may not be aligned with adoption. In such a framework, it becomes easy to justify backwards-incompatible major releases that, regardless of whether their opinion is justified, many users consider to be user-hostile. Framing Rust towards a larger mission that implies user adoption of core principals as a fundamental goal seems much cleaner in that regard, and could conceivably avoid similar pitfalls.
> The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
"Facilitate the growth" does not imply that dominance of a certain practice (whether that is use of Python, or adoption of its core principals) is a goal. So you have an incentive for the PSF to say "our international community is growing at a sufficient rate" and focus instead on "advancing the language," which may or may not be aligned with adoption. In such a framework, it becomes easy to justify backwards-incompatible major releases that, regardless of whether their opinion is justified, many users consider to be user-hostile. Framing Rust towards a larger mission that implies user adoption of core principals as a fundamental goal seems much cleaner in that regard, and could conceivably avoid similar pitfalls.