User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The first migrations to the Unified Community Platform/@comment-44921509-20201112140022/@comment-24006128-20201112190109

"May I know who the hell had the idea to implement this when the old thing worked perfectly normal"

The platform experts who recognized that staying on MediaWiki 1.19 indefinitely would make the effort to keep the platform running grow and grow over time, preventing us from improving anything eventually. The old thing didn't work perfectly normal. It was subject to bugs and issues like every other platform in the world. And its aging was starting to be a big problem, which is why we got ahead of the big problem and updated, getting back on track with MediaWiki releases so that we can focus less on having to reverse engineer fixes we'd get for free and focus more on improving the experience for all of our users.

This first phase of the project establishes that new MediaWiki track baseline and the next phase allows us to refine the experience.

Legacy had the benefit of years and years of specialized optimizations which could not be tranfered to the new platform. As we progress, the new platform will get better and better as similar optimizations are developed and implemented.