Oh, no, I misunderstood because I originally wrote out that I think Core needs even more forks or full rewrites.

I believe the opposite, that Core is mostly funded by companies that have specific interests, similar to the large corps that fund and contribute to Linux.

I'm not an expert by an means, but based solely on SLOC, I think it's doable to have at least 2-3 node implementations. I have not looked into libbitcoin very deeply, but maybe since they claimed recently that they can meet full consensus that it could become a viable option as well. Kind of talking out my ass now, so I'll stop.