Material Design

Design tokens were supposed to be liberating. Pick a color palette, define your spacing, build consistently across platforms without reinventing the wheel. Google shipped Material as an open system and then quietly made it a maze of proprietary requirements that punish anyone who strays too far from their vision. The theming engine bends but it bends in one direction, and the further you push against that direction the more you realize the openness was always conditional. Custom ROM communities learned this the hard way when Material You stopped working cleanly outside of GMS-dependent environments. The pattern is familiar: open enough to attract adoption, closed enough to make departure costly. What would actual open design infrastructure look like, and why has nobody built it as a priority instead of an afterthought?