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Third cause, less common but worth checking because it is invisible: not enough fat, and the related habit of skimping on the onion stage.

Most of the aromatic compounds in spices are fat-soluble. In a dish where the fat has been reduced for health reasons, there is less to dissolve them into and less to carry them, and the result tastes thin in a way that no amount of spice fixes. The same goes for a base where the onions were softened for five minutes instead of properly browned — that browning is a large part of the depth people are missing when they say a curry tastes like it is missing something.

Neither is exciting advice. But if you are following recipes accurately and getting a consistently muted result, the two steps most likely to have been shortened are the onion base and the fat.

Both neighbours are right about different fruit, and the distinction is whether the apple is rotting or diseased.

A sound apple that fell because it was ripe, and is now breaking down on the ground, is compost with extra steps. It feeds soil life, birds and insects eat it, and it carries no particular risk.

An apple that fell because it was diseased is a different object. Brown rot in particular overwinters in fruit — including fruit that dries out and stays hanging in the tree, which is the part people miss. Leave those and you are storing next season's infection at the base of the tree, ready to splash up in spring rain.

So the sorting rule is: sound windfalls can stay, visibly rotten or mummified fruit goes, and anything still attached and shrivelled should be picked off and removed too. That single distinction resolves most of the argument, and it is why two experienced gardeners can disagree honestly — they are each picturing a different pile.

On origin: "bloat" arrives from the ordinary sense of swelling — something distended beyond its natural size, usually with gas, and usually unhealthily. It is a deliberately unflattering metaphor and always has been.

It attached to software in the era when a program's size was a thing you felt constantly, because you were counting floppy disks and later worrying whether something fitted on a CD. When a text editor grew past what seemed reasonable, "bloated" was the natural word.

There is a related coinage worth knowing, because it names the mechanism rather than the result: feature creep, sometimes creeping featurism. That describes how it happens — each feature is individually justified, nobody removes anything, and the sum is enormous. Bloat is the state; feature creep is the process that produced it.

The pair covers your question fairly completely: feature creep causes bloat, and Wirth's law describes the race it wins.