FloPoCo started 15 years ago as a small library of basic floating-point operations for FPGAs. This talk will review the evolution of this tool since then from two perspectives. The first is that of the underlying science, as FloPoCo slowly cristallized a productive methodology for operator design, including operator specification, operator composition, and operator optimization. The second perspective is that of the software project. Initially, we distributed FloPoCo to support the wide claims we made in our articles. But then people started using it, and this is where problems started. Then people started contributing to it, and things got worse. This talk will reflect on the curse of success in open-source academic development. Finally, we will discuss how to bring some of the FloPoCo spirit into the brave new world of High-Level Synthesis.