I bet like you that this have been a strong factor, although other things like how its community structured into associations, organizing yearly gathering (when possible) and maybe the amount of available literature/songs certainly all plaid a role.
Also, what you point is not the whole light about Zamenhof and Esperanto reform attempts: at some point he did try to (reluctantly) bring some reform himself, but it was rejected by the community[1]. And this was only 6 years after Esperanto was released into the wild.
I can’t help but think about how tab was frozen into Makefiles "a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base"[2].
Also, what you point is not the whole light about Zamenhof and Esperanto reform attempts: at some point he did try to (reluctantly) bring some reform himself, but it was rejected by the community[1]. And this was only 6 years after Esperanto was released into the wild.
I can’t help but think about how tab was frozen into Makefiles "a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base"[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto [2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/20292/why...