Slightly worried by the vibe that comes off this. "I asked him about looking for inspiration in other modern file systems ... he was aware of them, but didn’t delve too deeply for fear, he said, of tainting himself". And (to paraphrase): 'bit-rot? What's that?'.
I would have hoped that a new filesystem with such wide future adoption would have come from a roomful of smart people with lots of experience of (for example) contributing to various modern filesystems, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and dealing with data corruption issues in the field. This doesn't come across that way at all.
Given Dominic's other output, I'm going to believe there's more to the story because he didn't strike me as someone who would actively ignore past innovations. I know it's a popular concept to NIH stuff when devs believe they know enough to build it, but so much stuff is just built poorly without consideration for existing designs and it shows in the poor software we have to live with.
I would have hoped that a new filesystem with such wide future adoption would have come from a roomful of smart people with lots of experience of (for example) contributing to various modern filesystems, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and dealing with data corruption issues in the field. This doesn't come across that way at all.