Can’t agree more with @dreuter’s post (that already got 3 likes btw). Adding some comments:
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I can’t help but to stress out that reducing maintenance cost for mid/longer term is worth being considered even at the earlier active development phase. So many packages in ROS are abandoned unfortunately (I assume it could be an inevitable nature of software life-cycle though). Reducing the maintenance cost is not the one-stop solution for that issue but can help both the maintainers to keep the maintenance work and finding new active maintainers.
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For consolidating packages/repositories,
- FYI MoveIt! projects recently consolidated several repositores of various modules into one larger repo. You can see the discussion back then.
- Separating packages just to allow end-users to easily swap one-by-one sounds like to me adding technical debt with very few advantages. I believe there are number of driver packages that handle multiple particular devices under the same product family.