Particularly with Gavin-- no surprise if you knew what Gavin's first message to Satoshi was...

And "could have been leaked"-- is that how he rationalized handing it over to Wright?

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.  Because of that, I wanted to design it to support every possible transaction type I could think of.  The problem was, each thing required special support code and data fields whether it was used or not, and only covered one special case at a time.  It would have been an explosion of special cases.  The solution was script, which generalizes the problem so transacting parties can describe their transaction as a predicate that the node network evaluates.  The nodes only need to understand the transaction to the extent of evaluating whether the sender's conditions are met.
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I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea.  So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network.  The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.