As one of those 20 people, I feel like I'm in good company!
Five years is pessimistic. The core library is still in a state of flux, but the team is getting the fundamentals hammered out. Once the foundation is in place, adding higher level apis should be relatively straightforward.
Re: XLA/MLIR, s4tf is actively trying to coordinate with other groups within google. Whatever short term losses there are in time/energy will be paid off down the road when the project can piggyback off other people's progress.
Finally, while the swift evolution process isn't going as quickly as would be desired, the changes needed to merge the tensorflow branch have been identified and are being worked on. It's just a matter of time till the two projects are in sync.
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