Even if we had a list of breaking changes and I could remember that I was compliant up to change #23 then I could see how many new breaking changes I need to keep up with.  Not great, but better than what we have now.

Ideally though we have very few breaking changes.  I understand sometimes the alternative is horrible and the breaking change is needed to 'save nostr'. I'm okay with it if they are few and far between, and well communicated.

But when people just think "Eh, this NIP could be done better. Let's do it my way. I'm gonna rewrite it"  that is where I think things have gone off the deep end. The new ideas are great ones, but they are different, therefore IMHO it needs to be a new NIP, not a change to an existing NIP.  Those kinds of changes shouldn't get merged.