what happened to the heady days of the internet when a standard popped onto the scene and quickly matured to give way for the next one?
They didn't last beyond the days when the net was only used by a small group of experts and highly technical users. The state of the web in the late 90s and the early zeroes (remember that?) was a direct result of following this sort of philosophy on an unworkably large scale, with multiple competing platforms with inconsistent feature sets (sometimes deliberately so).
You can't just throw something together when it will be used by literally billions of people, many of which will never update their software unless forced to, and implemented by dozens of entities with differing agendas, technical constraints, and visions of progress, that just leads to madness, browser wars, and the biggest installed base winning.
Buddhism is hardly a minor religion (fifth largest according to wikipedia) and one of its precepts is not to take any life.
A nice middle ground is building a minimal arduino clone.
It's the other way around. Commercial games are limited by the amount of ROM in the cart, homebrew games can use as much of the card it is stored on. Unless you're using big and small to mean something other than data size...
"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"