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Notes -
I'd caveat that Quilt mostly split over more conventional trans-specific Culture War. If you want the exact background, here and here (cw: discussion of suicide) are the Quilt-favorable perspectives on the events, though I'll caution that they're a long and very inside-baseball read.
((Also some even more boring problems related to bikeshedding: literally a year of Fluid API attempts.))
The increasing recognition of multiplicity/plurality stuff seems to have been a downstream effect of evaporative cooling and a few of the early Quilt coders (I think gdude? and silver?) being plural or plural-adjacent, and having roles early on that made it easier to bring up or turn into community rules or norms. But afaik the whole thing was little more than a curiosity for Fabric even early into the split.
In the end, both Quilt and Fabric are a bit of a rounding error for total users: the biggest Quilt and Fabric mods gets tiny download counts, and those are often straight clones or ports of their Forge equivalents. There's interesting stuff happening in places, but they're more for the programmer and friends than a general category of users.
There's a not-implausible argument that they've encouraged better behavior from LexManos and Forge -- at the very least, Forge is a lot more willing to work with people now than in the 1.7-1.12 era, especially for ASM/mixins -- but at the same time the increasingly fractured community makes it hard to work or onboard newcomers. I've got hopes that Quilt may try to solve a few dependency problems (mostly resolution, but also a variant of the diamond problem) that wouldn't be possible for Forge to force or practical for Fabric's design team, but it hasn't really done that yet.
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