Wow! Ten years. That's pretty impressive commitment from Van der Laan.
It looks like he wanted to decentralize developing ability so that less relied on a single individual.
He was starting to delegate more tasks to others since Jan 2001, according to his blog:
https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.htmlI realize I am myself somewhat of a centralized bottleneck. And although I find Bitcoin an extremely interesting project and believe it’s one of the most important things happening at the moment, I also have many other interests. It’s also particularly stressful and I don’t want it, nor the bizarre spats in the social media around it, to start defining me as a person.