I think objectively bigger at the moment. Ethereum keeps throwing interesting problems at us while engineering in this open and complex context continues to get more difficult given the complexity of the system, the amount of individuals involved, and the fact that so many people depend on invariants and stability of the live system.
It is quite difficult to be in the middle of this increasing ossification of the system while also trying desperately to improve it to reach sufficient functionality to provide the basis for scale and application layer extension and ensure security in this increasingly adversarial environment. But, ossification in the long run does buy Ethereum something very powerful -- it ensures that the system cannot be captured and altered by the whims of highly capitalized and powerful entities in the long run.
All that said, The Merge was a fundamental rearchitecture of the system which relied on a quite a bit of fundamental changes to both layers of the stack and more importantly required new methods to think about, test, and debug this two-layered system. This security and testing is what has taken the most time in the process, but has laid a foundation to be reused and extended for future upgrades. That is, a ton of the work to get the Merge out the door represents the systems, the methodology, and the stack that will help get future upgrades out. So I do think that upgrades like 4844 have a really solid foundation to move more quickly with that.
And yes -- there are specs that will never make it to the protocol. There are already specs that were written that never made it and there will be more. We've all tossed out work that we've put months if not years into in an ever active search to simplify and improve. Engineering taking a long time has actually ensured that the final products that do make it into the Ethereum protocol are much simpler and much better than initial specifications. If we could always ship the best of our ideas immediately on a given day, month, or year, we'd have a much less refined and secure system. Instead, the engineering bottleneck and insatiable hunger for simplicity ensures we are constantly refining specs, stripping them to their most simple core which is ultimately better for Ethereum.
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