I find that really unfortunate. I think alternative implementations should be encouraged.
I enthusiastically
disagree.
If there are two independent Bitcoin clients with roughly equal market share, then the protocol becomes the intersection of supported features on both clients. The protocol is no longer singularly developed ahead of the reference implementation. It will be possible for some feature to be added to the protocol (by people who also happen to be devs of the first clients), but the second client torpedoes the feature by not implementing it. This is the exact hell that is facing LN at this very moment.
It's the reason why you don't see any major improvements to the PDF format. Because ISO standards have a tendency of staying put.NAT hit the nail on the head.
The whole point of a Standard is that no single entity - eg Adobe or Microsoft et al - can futz with it by adding 'features' to make it more their own format based on their own particular marketing plans. Adobe in the past attempted to do exactly that every time a 3rd party put out a pdf reader/writer like Foxit Reader and initially MS's implementations of it tried to add 'Features' geared specifically to the 'Doze OS. The whole point of pdf was to have a universal document format that is not tied to 1 specific software vendor or OS and to have documents produced using it to be able to be easily accessed for decades without having to find an old copy of the software that produced it.
The developers involved with Core bend over backwards to ensure that any changes made to the
BTC protocol have a REAL functional purpose and do not break older versions. In the case of LN obviously the various developers could care less about that because they have their own agendas.