Perhaps that is part of it. I did work in the main repo. I was looking into some of the teams under the Android/Chrome org before I left, but none of it seemed too different to me despite seeing some new projects. They didn't seem like bottom-up initiatives though.

AFAIK 20% time is dead, and has been for > the last 2 years. People only use it to try out new teams before transferring.

But I never did get access to the "other" codebase, so you know more than I in that respect. :)