Messy code, branches with a lack of guidelines and comments are killing Marlin!

Marlin no more exists as a single, readable, common branch!

Where shall I go now?

In a previous post, I described a tiny contribution I made to the 3D printer firmware Marlin. The deal was to help with the calibration of a Delta printer thanks to a manual Z-probe (calibration really is the drawback of Delta printers, due to their weird geometry as compared to easier cartesian X-Y bots like the usual printers). It was already painful for such a small, one-time improvement to the code source, and given the invested time, I tried to make it broader by implementing multi-line comments (and to learn about git by the way).
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t_hal-fixing-a-light-bulb_fun

This is how I feel when I want to code something in Marlin!

(Malcom in the Middle, fixing a light bulb)

So I worked in mainstream Marlin. My idea was that it could benefit to existing variants of Marlin as well, when they decide to get changes from the "official" parent. But it does not work so well in reality.

This experience unveiled another, deeper, issue related to the many Marlin variants, and I think it is due to the fundamental way github works, in addition to git own complexity. In my opinion, Marlin is just dying because of this, together with the limits of the Arduino platform.