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Yes, it's important to distinguish annoyances of the codec from annoyances of the ecosystem.

Ecosystem being slow to adopt it is something that can be fixed or improved, but also more importantly (given jpegxl & avif comparisons) are things that will impact any new image format.

Meanwhile annoyances of the codec tend to be things that are dramatically harder to deal with. Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit. Or that many of these newer image codecs do not have ways to work with them in a memory efficient manner like jpeg does (see eg libjpeg-turbo's sample size & skip scanline options). Or WebP insisted on being in a RIFF container for... uh... absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever afaict. Fortunately RIFF is so trivial that this overhead doesn't actually matter in practice, but then HEIC & AVIF dials up the annoying container bullshit to 11 thanks to their video heritage with ISOBMFF

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It seems much harder to get an audience as someone complaining about technical details of codecs and their implementations, than as someone complaining about the formats (which in practical terms is always going to mean the ecosystem, or really, how broad the support base is or what the user has to do in order to deal with it).
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> Like HEIC being a license minefield and also slow as shit.

How much slower? I'm finding very conflicting numbers.

But on the timescale of "wow this still doesn't support webp" those patents will solve themselves soon.

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Perhaps it's a matter of who hits the pain point? Ugly specs make annoyed devs, licensing problems make distributors unhappy, and ecosystem issues leave users unimpressed. (With some spillover between categories, of course.)
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