We don't know why people don't do this sort of thing more often. It's not like there's a bad reason to leave a giant dragon skull on the beach.
Madness string 3137
The Original Sin that sabotaged my citation graph workflow is that I used Redis as my data store, a data store that does everything in RAM. This killed scalability, disabled the service for years, and the only reason it came back is because I finally had a machine with enough RAM to run it. Currently I am working on a next-generation database in Postgres, and once I do this I may be able to rewrite Citationgraph Bot to use that instead.