> As the article says, Bernstein's stuff won out because his work is at the intersection of solid crypto, clean and performant code, and sane API design.

As a casual observer, my impression has been pretty different. Here's an excerpt from the README of curve25519-donna, which it seemed like everyone was using for a while:

curve25519 is an elliptic curve, developed by Dan Bernstein, for fast Diffie-Hellman key agreement. DJB's original implementation was written in a language of his own devising called qhasm. The original qhasm source isn't available, only the x86 32-bit assembly output.

Since many x86 systems are now 64-bit, and portability is important, this project provides alternative implementations for other platforms.

My impression has always been that what we get from DJB is some wacky implementation written in a language of his own devising, or just the 32bit assembler output of that, or some partial code fragment that has to be disentangled from his benchmarking library, and the only thing that makes this usable are people who are motivated to do the work of making it digestible by mortals.