The author critiques Qiskit 1 for breaking backward compatibility and alienating its core community. The shift toward production environments may benefit some users, but it's left educational resources and much of the existing codebase outdated, frustrating both developers and educators. The removal of Qiskit's textbook and abrupt changes feel like a disconnect from the community that helped build its success.

Could the reason for this be that with so few hardware providers, co-design between hardware and software is unavoidable, giving companies like IBM more influence? If so, it makes me wonder if forking Qiskit to make it more community-driven would even be feasible right now. Thoughts?