> It may have still been possible to do a big rework of Martini or even just deprecate Martini and move to Gin...idk.

But again, this project (Gin) is completely unrelated to Martini. Martini itself is not that old; deprecating it would be pretty poor form given that refactoring your project to work with Gin would be A Big Deal.

If the author had forked Martini your argument would have made more sense, but we shouldn't be afraid of building something new just because someone else broke similar ground before.