@Sacha @OliverTY This discussion of Substrate vs. Polkadot SDK is quite a complicated one, I will chime in.
Personally, I don’t like sunsetting Substrate as a brand, but it is the safer thing to do. I have stated it recently here. Nonetheless, I haven’t given up on keeping it firmly as a part of Polkadot-SDK either, for example here.
The idea of Substrate as the neutral backbone of Polkadot is super cool. And for many years, Parity invested greatly into making Substrate powerful and independent of Polkadot. I am personally proud of all the effort done here. The fact that Substrate is used to build Solochains as well is a net positive event for Polkadot as a whole.
But, the main flaw of the structure is that there is no team out there that maintains Substrate+FRAME truly independent of its identity as a part of Polkadot-SDK. This means that a single team has one foot in the mindset of “Substrate is independent” and one foot in “Polkadot SDK ftw”, with a clear verdict that if it comes to it, the latter is more important.
In other words, a single team (atm Parity organization) cannot be tasked with both:
- Maintain substrate as an independent project
- Make it fulfill every need of Polkadot
This will inevitably lead to clashes both in branding and technical aspects, and we have seen that in the last year or so.
So, I think the only way out is to acknowledge that we cannot have both, and then acknowledge that if we are to chose one, for now, Polkadot SDK is better/more-important than Substrate. This is how I came to my current conclusion.
Yet, in more practical terms, we cannot erase Substrate from the face of internet. I think we should keep the keyword, and use it, but always in the shadow of Polkadot SDK. This both conveys the branding idea that this is “part of Polkadot”, and the technical idea “it is unopinionated, but also very much made to make Polkadot happen”.