The principle of separation of mechanism and policy is really nice... except when some part of policy inadvertently makes its way into the mechanism. If the mechanism then becomes widely used, partly because of its flexibility, it can be really hard to change.
For a leading example, this principle is very much used in the design of the Internet... except that a tiny piece of policy is embedded in the mechanism; it says that there can only be some 3-4 billion participants. This is rather fewer than the number of people on the planet, and is now becoming a real problem.
I have a feeling a similar problem may have affected The GIMP; somehow, they got the image modes (RGB, greyscale, indexed) embedded in the core in such a way that new modes were practically impossible, even when this became a serious limitation, perhaps the main serious limitation of the program.
Of course, it's probably impossible to design a mechanism that's completely policy-free.
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