Oh look, Google is shipping their org chart again.<p><pre><code> > What problems are Editions solving?
>
> In short, nothing really (for end users). The introduction of Editions
> is the result of major Google-internal refactoring of how protoc and its
> plugin architecture implements and observes feature checks when generating
> code. This isn’t intended to force breaking changes to existing projects,
> nor is it designed to impact any of the existing encodings.
>
> It should be a boring change that gives plugin maintainers finer-grained
> control over how future versions of their Protobuf runtimes behave,
> improvements are made, and new features are introduced. Having said that,
> it’s impossible to ignore the explosion of verbosity that Editions has
> introduced to the project as a side-effect of this level of available control.
</code></pre>
According to Google themselves, this change "solves no user problems" and introduces "an explosion of verbosity."