I might have phrased that badly with the 5 years thing. Obviously no one doing open source owes anyone else their time or effort. I do think that projects which stay afloat for a significant amount of time are those where the maintainers keep using the software for their own purpose.

In any case, I wish you good luck with that project, and might become a user if it comes to fruition too.

Most of these “project-but-without-<insert enshittification option here>” forks tend to be abandoned rather quickly unfortunately. Maintaining compatibility with a large codebase that is not yours is not the fun part of software development.

I would say clbre and arcalibre are already abandoned, looking at the activity on these repos (none in clbre, and issues/PRs piling up in arcalibre). If you can envision yourself still dedicating your time to this endeavor 5 years from now, you might as well move forward with your own thing.