I think Kevin is asserting that to make strong comparative claims about the quality of either system, it's good to have a large and functionally similar body of work to compare the systems with, not that there is no way to improve on Lean's core :)
MSR funds a single developer. The Lean community consists of at least 30 or so active contributors right now, with many more having contributed in the past. Most folks work in academia. Much of Lean's success is absolutely due to the work of that single developer, but I don't think that the playing field is uneven due to MSR's funding.
Thanks! But does that not already answer your question as to why Lean would use CIC and not a simpler metatheory?
That particular paper is from 2016 and the type theory presented there is still lacking a number of features from CIC, with those particular extensions being listed as further research. Work on Lean started in 2013 and the kernel in particular has not been touched in a long time for good reason. Around that time, CIC was already battle-proven with there being popular and well-tested reference implementations to learn from. Since then, all the fancy work has been done on the system surrounding the kernel.
I believe one of the goals at the start was that the kernel should be sufficiently simple and small so that it is easy to ensure that the kernel is correct. Despite the apparent redundant complexity that you suggest, the implementation still seems to be sufficiently simple to reach this goal, as no proof of false that was a result of a kernel bug has been reported yet. CIC being well-tested surely also contributed to that.
Another reason is that, as I understand it, it was not always obvious that Lean would break decidability of defeq. Afaik proof irrelevance was only baked in with Lean 3, while it was an option before that. By that point I don't see much of a reason to rewrite an entire kernel that has worked fine so far.
I also vaguely remember that there were arguments related to performance in favor of the current system (e.g. versus W-types), but I don't really understand these things well enough to make that point with confidence :)
I think one of the reasons is that Lean's approximation of defeq still works well enough in practice. As mentioned by others, you never really run into the kind of counter examples that break theoretical properties, but instead into examples where checking defeq is inacceptably slow, which remains an issue even when defeq is decidable.
From my understanding CiC is used because it allows using a unified language for proofs, specifications, programs and types, which greatly simplifies the system. For example, in Lean 4, more or less the entire system is built on the same core term language: Proofs, propositions / specifications, programs, tactics (i.e. meta programs), the output of tactics and even Lean 4 itself are all written in that same language, even if they don't always use the same method of computation. In my eyes, for the purposes of writing and checking proofs, CiC is quite complex; but if you want to capture all of the above and have them all checked by the same kernel, CiC seems like a fairly minimal metatheory to do so, even with undecidable type checking.
If you're interested in interactive theorem proving with Lean (and not condensed mathematics), the Lean community landing page is a good place to start. https://leanprover-community.github.io/
Especially the "Natural Number Game" under "Learning resources" has been successful in teaching folks the very basics for writing proofs. Once finished, a textbook like "Theorem Proving in Lean" can teach the full basics. Feel free to join the Lean Zulip at any point and ask questions at https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/ in the #new members stream.
Mathlib has plenty of contributions from interested undergrads :)
Some constructivists may also take offense with proof irrelevance (and the resulting loss of normalization [1] or its incompatibility with HoTT), which you can only really avoid by avoiding Prop.
I don't think anyone is trying to sell Lean as a constructive system. The current developers certainly don't think of it that way, further evidenced by the fact that the typical way of doing computation in Lean does not involve definitional reduction, but using `#eval` with additional low level code for performance. Proof irrelevance (and quotients) were adopted with that in mind.
As far as I can tell, this is not quite true. Tactic proofs aside, you can also write functional term mode proofs and declarative "structured" proofs in the sense of Isar. Theorem Proving in Lean introduces that style, so most people who use Lean are familiar with it: E.g. https://leanprover.github.io/theorem_proving_in_lean/proposi...
Additionally, even in tactic proofs you can use tactics like `have`, `suffices`, etc. to manipulate the structure of the proof and make subgoals explicit like you would usually do in the structured style.
In practice, people in Lean still prefer imperative tactic proofs with the option to write in a structured/declarative style where reasonable. The full "structured" mode does not see much use, since it is quite verbose.
As a result, Lean 4 will not support this style out of the box anymore, but you could still add it yourself using the macro system.
Because the book is a great introduction to theorem proving in general. All those concepts learned translate nicely to other theorem provers, and especially Lean 4.
MSR funds a single developer. The Lean community consists of at least 30 or so active contributors right now, with many more having contributed in the past. Most folks work in academia. Much of Lean's success is absolutely due to the work of that single developer, but I don't think that the playing field is uneven due to MSR's funding.