ASDF is getting bigger and bigger. Faré and others wish to do some more exciting things with ASDF, like make it the basis for scripting, etc.
BUT: ASDF is the "make" of Common Lisp. It must be stable and solid. The whole community depends upon it.
So... How can we have our cake and eat it, too?
If people want to do more exciting things with ASDF, and don't want to develop their own build system from scratch (the Java folks seem to do this every 15 minutes), it's time to allow the community better hooks to personalize ASDF, instead of making it more and more complicated and, inevitably, more brittle.
Then, if you hot rod your ASDF, you can make it do exactly what you want, like your emacs or your linux box. And you won't mess up everyone's reliable but boring commuter sedan in the process.
The flexibility of Lisp should let us provide the hooks to let people build a playground on top of ASDF. Let's figure out how to do this.