I point out an inaccuracy, you'll notice I did not post this here

I never said you did post it.

and frankly, I'm not here to defend anything, as I have no need to justify the existence of my project.

That's what you did when you first commented, and it's easy to see that doing it then saying "I don't want to discuss any further" when faced with disagreement looks silly from anyone else's PoV. It's just bad discussion etiquette.

And unrelated projects with a differing history are to be used to judge either my merits or talents, or the merits of my project?

Absolutely, that's how history is applied in every field of knowledge or endeavor in existence. Patterns of previous events are observed and compared to unfolding events to make relevant judgements.

I don't think so. Mint had traction long before it had a custom desktop, I was involved with Linux Mint in 6.0, and brought Linux Mint Debian Edition into existence. It's had traction for years, even before Cinnamon, before MGSE, even way back to the GNOME 2.32 days.

My point was not that Mint succeeded because of it's DE (which might actually be true, at least looking at recent years), but that they certainly would not have been able to develop those DEs and a completely new package ecosystem simultaneously. I don't think there is a single project at the moment with manpower to do both competently.

Again with the packaging. Again, Solus cares very little about packaging. We're not making a generic distribution, so I don't understand how this argument is even valid.

Do you expect people to reboot when they want to use some piece of software that is not packaged? Personal computers are general purpose devices. Not addressing it in the distribution does not mean people will stop wanting to do things you haven't considered, just that they will have to find alternative, usually more unpleasant ways to do it.

you speak as if we want lots of packages, we most certainly do not.

Don't you think the users will?

We sacrifice that intentionally to provide a slimmer, more suitable option, optimised for the task at hand.

What is the "task at hand"? Is it not providing a graphical computing environment? In that case, the task at hand certainly does include, for most people, running many kinds of different applications inside that environment. It's not reasonable to expect the included ones to fulfill everyone's needs.

Define success. On the grounds of a non-commercial project one can only expect success to be defined as others adopting our methodology, technologies, and an increasing userbase. So, yes.

So what does the new PM bring that is attractive to adopt compared to anything that already exists?

I'm not here to sell out in the hopes of attracting yourself, or others, in this thread.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to avoid doing the opposite by being unnecessarily unpleasant.

I merely find it amusing that it's the same old baseless arguments (in the context of Solus) for a traditional distribution vs what we're creating, and constantly having to defend something I've made for free.

Solus doesn't exist in a vacuum. Wanting to have software available in a generic computing operating system is not baseless. It's the whole purpose. The fact you chose not to address that need for one reason or another does not make it any less pervasive in how people use computers.

Also, you just said you want others to adopt your technologies and approach. How do you expect that to happen without convincing anyone of it? You don't have to defend your project if you simply want to continue doing it. Don't get me wrong, I don't intend to imply you should stop or anything of the sort, but simply doing it for free is not justification enough for anyone to want to use it, invest in it, or learn from it.

The options are that I spend lots of time engaging in these usually fruitless discussions on reddit, where I will point out on inaccuracy if I do indeed spot one via referall, or let's be honest, I could be discussing issues with folks on IRC, and our forums, or our G+, or indeed our bug tracker.

Maybe your pre-disposition to considering the discussions here fruitless has a part on it actually becoming true. Again, you can't make a comment, and when responded to, just lash out and expect good discussion to come from there.