Over the last few months, the Platform team of maintainers and developers have been talking about future directions. One of our goals for this year is to introduce namespacing. This has been a very large undertaking and as work has progressed, it became obvious that backward compatibility was going to be a constant battle. One of the negative side-effects of this would be that the Joomla CMS wouldn’t be able to use the planned 13.1 release of the Platform for some time if we introduced namespacing in that version.
After a lot of discussion both internally and with other developers in the community, in order to address the problem, as well as to take advantage of some new opportunities, we’ve decided to make some changes to the Platform.