[godelski]

  > why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.

Because it's still useful to have a blessed child so that people getting into the space have somewhere to start. You could accept zero additional PRs and it would still be a useful thing to have.

The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.

But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers