argot was spun out of ethereum foundation with a mandate to maintain ethereum's core programming languages and developer tooling.
then it immediately begins to launder research as if it was core infrastructure maintenance.
if you read their blog, they spend a lot of resources on fe, a language that has been "emerging" for over 5 years. they have long plans for fe, while the language itself has seen zero adoption and zero production use. their long term goal is "non-trivial contracts in production-like setting".
meanwhile vyper is actual production infrastructure. it secures real protocols, with real users and tvl, and real audit surface. curve, lido, yearn, frax, velodrome all use vyper.
yet vyper lives grant-to-grant, while argot started with a $16.6m check, about as much as ethereum started with.
argot doesn't disclose how much time and energy it spends on the fe fantasy versus solidity, sourcify, hevm, or other genuinely core tooling. but clearly this pet project abuses and stretches the mandate. even though it's a programming language, by no serious measure it's "core". it should spin out and try to survive and prove demand independently.
production compiler maintenance should get baseline funding before speculative language incubation gets considererd.
vyper is in good shape today despite the ecosystem, not because of it. and it still does not sit right with me that resources keep getting misallocated away from the compiler people actually use.
ethereum keeps saying "public goods", then funds the toy compiler like infrastructure and makes the production compiler pass the hat. that is not stewardship.