Interesting. My take was that language, standard library and third-party libraries are part of the same state space, just organized by the amount of use they receive. Since user-space libraries receive less hammering (many have just one user) they're usually still in the "adding exceptions" phase and haven't yet attained (and perhaps never will attain) the simplicity on the other side of complexity when the requirements stabilize.
I think that maps to your distinction, except that I don't believe in 'exhaustiveness'. The state space of a program isn't some fixed thing for most programs. It evolves and grows in response to what we want it to do, which dimensions we choose to generalize along and where we stay stable. I think it's equally reasonable to view the evolution of special cases as equally exhaustive at every point, it's the boundaries of the state space (requirements) that is growing in strange ways.
I think that maps to your distinction, except that I don't believe in 'exhaustiveness'. The state space of a program isn't some fixed thing for most programs. It evolves and grows in response to what we want it to do, which dimensions we choose to generalize along and where we stay stable. I think it's equally reasonable to view the evolution of special cases as equally exhaustive at every point, it's the boundaries of the state space (requirements) that is growing in strange ways.