[zxzax]

You are perceiving arrogance where there is none. These are volunteer-driven projects, for better or worse the deal has always been "take it or leave it," or fork it if that's what you prefer. If there is something you want extracted into a library, just go and extract it and make the library. Of course if you choose to abandon it entirely then it's going to be a total crapshoot if it improves the way you want it to.

[AstralStorm]

This attitude results in the only possible answer being "leave it". Nobody has time to fix it in any nontrivial way who isn't being paid to do it, and if you're being paid, it's not volunteer work and you're supposed to pull your weight.

RedHat is not a volunteer project and it ate half of Linux. Volunteer projects in fact tend to be the more stable and polished parts of it.

[zxzax]

I'm not sure what you mean, the paid people are still volunteering. They don't really have to spend company time upstreaming anything, they could technically keep all their patches in a private fork, but the company allows them to upstream things because it makes the most sense. You also don't have to leave it, you can also make a private fork too, and work on it slowly, if it makes the most sense to you.

These complaints about Red Hat are what make no sense to me, if you believe they are "eating Linux" for the worse then I would advise you to produce a version of Linux with all of the Red Hat commits removed, and see for yourself if it's more stable and polished. It may not be, because you would likely also be removing a lot of the bug fixes they upstream.