Louise thanks for starting this thread! Everyone else thanks for contributing all the great feedback. We’re super excited to work on BNS again!
Hank mentioned this but I’ll mention again: Migrating to a new version of BNS would require a hardfork. Trying to reach consensus on these types of design decisions has historically been slow (this thread demonstrates that and also the thread on mining).
We wanted to fix these problems fast but also felt a bit stuck by this hardfork requirement—that was until Hank conceived of this wrapping mechanism for backwards compatibility. We’re just going to try building it. We will work in public and deploy a version of BNS that can run in parallel, and be backwards compatible, forever if needed. If our upgrades are successful then eventually this new system can become adopted as the official BNS V2. If our changes suck, or another team wants to release an even better version, then no harm done. Flexibility and speed are our guiding principles on this one.
If you’re not familiar with my cofounder Hank: He was an early engineer at Hiro from 2018–2021 where he built the Hiro web wallet from the ground up. Hank is very knowledgable on BNS and Clarity. He has also gained a ton of trust with the Stacks engineering community over the years. I know he can do a great job taking the feedback above and swiftly shipping an 80/20 solution.
If you are a Stacks builder and have integrated with BNS please say hi. We are eager to help you succeed and would love to hear from you. We are busy coding but will be sharing more updates soon!