Looking behind to look ahead.
"... and not always well thought out".
I think that's the really pointy-bit. The current trend of /var/lib/ falls very neatly in that category, I wot. I still remember the days of "/var/ shouldn't get very big...". I think /var/lib/ happened because it was A Little Change. If a new top directory appeared, say, /app/, within which dpkg put its cache and build areas, MySQL put its database, cvs its repositories, etc etc then it would have been a much more visible change and more discussion would have happened.
Perl's bad habits I understand. I'm still sore about a Perl distro masquerading as a CPAN module -- and it's bloody difficult to get a Perl-head to understand what was wrong with that.
Wade.