[skywhopper]

Many of the people involved in the history of Linux (and most software) are jerks, but when people dig up a “this jerk blocked X for 25 years” story, we aren’t seeing the 100s of other (mostly bad) ideas that same jerk also blocked that would have changed things in other ways (possibly for the worse).

My point being, not that the person isn’t a jerk or that the decision wasn’t wrong, but that one error by one jerk doesn’t tell us much.

[MichaelZuo]

It does tell us that there has been no advancement in terms of jerk gatekeeping.

Because there is no easy way to determine if they actually blocked hundreds of bad ideas.

[vladms]

If a project does not have several hundreds of bad ideas, then probably it is not popular. I don't follow that many projects in detail, but all that I follow get a lot of bad ideas in time.

I think being qualified as a jerk or not is orthogonal to the need of gatekeeping (required in my opinion) or the quantities (higher for more popular).

[MichaelZuo]

How does this relate to the point that no one can determine?, of course they can guess and estimate…

[motorest]

> (...) we aren’t seeing the 100s of other (mostly bad) ideas that same jerk also blocked that would have changed things in other ways (possibly for the worse).

Perhaps you're not seeing because those never existed? I mean, even though you're clearly speaking in hypotheticals, you're fabricating an outlandish scenario where somehow you associate being a jerk with a 100s-to-1 success rate. But there is nothing to support or even suggest that's even remotely real, plausible, or even conceivable. You have only concrete evidence of someone rejecting a sound recommendation on the grounds of gatekeeping mixed with NIH. Gatekeeping and NIH are not quality gates, are they? If that is the process, obviously you cannot expect a positive outcome.