Developing distributed real-time systems is a complex task that has historically entailed specialized handcraft. In this paper, we propose a retrospective on the (r)evolutionary changes that led to the transition from low-level programming to industrial full-fledged model-based development embodied by the Rubus Component Model and its tool-ecosystem. We focus on the needs, challenges, and solutions of a 15-year-long evolution journey of a software development approach that has gone from low-level and manual programming to a highly automated environment offering modeling, analysis, and development of vehicular software systems with multi-criticality for deployment on single- and multi-core platforms.