I agree it's worth pausing to ask what is going on. Recent tweets and articles I've seen give the impression that the project is somehow moving entirely to Spark (or even Stratosphere?), or, entirely to H20. These are sweeping changes that sound very hard to reconcile.
The reality seems more like: someone wants to add some Spark-based matrix stuff and someone else wants to add some H20-based matrix stuff. These are individually intriguing, and less hard to reconcile, although sound overlapping. But then, it's not clear what happens to the rest of the code base, most of which is not related? Rewriting it seems far out of scope of available effort, and not what anyone is suggesting. I assume deleting it, while coherent, would be too extreme. Speaking as a downstream consumer now, the de facto plan emerging here seems to be a plan to worsen, not address, the significant inconsistencies and problems in the code already. There would be undistributed, MR1, MR2, Spark, H20 code of differing flavors scattered around. It sounds like a step away from 1.0-readiness at a time when this seems to be advertised as coming soon. In the context of a board report, I would think it's also important to acknowledge this perspective, as it is almost certainly causing the project to be removed from a major ecosystem distributor.
