[Nanana909]

It seemed quite pretentious and dismissive to me too. Sorry, didn’t intend to imply I agreed fully with the quote. But there is a deeper point which is part of our root comment: is it a genuine effort or a negotiation tactic?

[jakear]

False dichotomy. It's a step forward toward a better experience for all who want to write systems code with strict ownership semantics. It may be acting as a negotiation tactic now, but it's existence is only possible as a result of genuine effort of the folks involved in its creation. And if it's existence causes Rust team members to continue to publicly out themselves as pretentious try-hards who take the B out of BDFL, then it will become more and more genuinely important and useful for someone to have already put the work into maintaining a real fork.