Graphite is built to be a programmatic data processing pipeline that takes the form of a render engine and WYSIWYG editor. You'll be able to write custom code for every part of the system.
And because it's time for a fresh start. Sometimes you can't turn around a heavy ship, and that ship doesn't want to be turned around. It's easy to write a sentence like that, but once you actually think about it, how does an outsider with a good idea and a capability to execute on it somehow approach an existing project and decide to "take it over"? That would be neither viable nor would it yield a desirable outcome. We're building something fundamentally different from Inkscape that just so happens to eclipse it.
Exactly! The only thing harder than making something so ambitious would be doing it in a huge legacy codebase with an existing leadership team fighting against someone vying to rock the boat. Being new is an opportunity, not a flaw. It means there's a lot of work to do, but that's tractable with the right organization structure that I think we've successfully managed to build— and it's something other projects really struggle with, so starting fresh in that respect also avoids problems from cultural elements that could very well be the blame for the inadequacies of those existing projects.
And because it's time for a fresh start. Sometimes you can't turn around a heavy ship, and that ship doesn't want to be turned around. It's easy to write a sentence like that, but once you actually think about it, how does an outsider with a good idea and a capability to execute on it somehow approach an existing project and decide to "take it over"? That would be neither viable nor would it yield a desirable outcome. We're building something fundamentally different from Inkscape that just so happens to eclipse it.