Why would Kaspa hard-fork or restart testnet 11 instead of just patching it?

The Kaspa development team suggested hard-forking or fully restarting testnet 11 (TN11) so the finalized rules take effect cleanly, without carrying forward interim versions that would clutter the codebase. When a testnet goes through multiple rounds of rule changes — some provisional, some final — the code can accumulate multiple overlapping versions that are hard to reason about and maintain. A hard fork applies the fixed rules from a specific point forward; a full restart wipes the testnet's history and begins fresh. For beginners, this illustrates a key difference between testnets and mainnet: testnets are disposable sandboxes whose history can be discarded whenever it helps developers keep the code clean, something that could never be done on mainnet where real transaction history must be preserved.