Because we rely on hunspell and Emacs can use it.

Emacs supports three spelling checkers by default: Hunspell, which is now widely used by popular free software such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird; GNU Aspell, which pays particular attention to quality of suggestions, and the original Ispell. If no spell checker is manually configured, Emacs will choose aspell over hunspell over ispell.

Source: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractiveSpell

aspell hasn't seen an update since 2011 and the last attempt to get a new release out was a year ago and nothing came of it.

Fair enough. I guess it's time to update my emacs config. Thanks for taking a look.

@DataDrake my understanding is that the problem with Hunspell is that is has trouble trying parse camel cased words, whereas aspell has a run together option to deal with camel cased words, making aspell popular among programmers for parsing comments or technical writeups. Does hunspell currently have a way of dealing with camel caseing I am not aware of?

There is a github issue for Camel Casing, but it is still open: https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/issues/468

@retiform that may well be true, but it has nothing to do with our decision to reject aspell. That was based solely on aspell being unmaintained by its upstream.