i've been using primarily haxepunk for game development for the past five years or so. it's a lightweight haxe framework based on flashpunk, for those who remember that. it's widely considered dead; the website 404s, the last update on GitHub that wasn't by me was in 2020, and the #haxepunk channel was (annoyingly) deleted from the haxe discord. there's basically no resources available online anymore, except for a guide i wrote on getting started with it and the API docs that i reuploaded.
the thought i had that inspired me to write this is that even before the weeds of disuse grew around haxepunk, i think the main reason people wrote it off as dead was that it wasn't getting updated anymore. but i think the reason for that is that it was done. aside from a couple of very minor bugs i've caught and fixed, it's rock solid and feature complete; i've never found myself wanting anything it didn't have. and in my mind, the quality of being finished and stable far outweighed any speculative benefits it could have attained from continued work on it.
all this is to say that i think the quality of being finished is sometimes conflated with being irrelevant, which is weird because we've all experienced a thing we liked getting worse because the pressures of capitalism demanded it be developed past the more or less ideal form it had already arrived at.
if i had a bigger heart and more time i would take it on myself to get haxepunk's website back up and running and merge all my fixes into the main branch, but i suspect it'd be more work than i anticipate for not much payoff, so i haven't. which also maybe points to the problem of totally functional FOSS tools being dependent on a single person's continued unpaid labor...
