After having been paid for a few months to do upstreaming, I know very well that nobody close to the linux kernels is doing any 'coding' anymore.
it's seems to be more of an excercise into pleasing the priesthood to their, current, very important way/shape/form "canon" of what IS right at the moment than actually get any 'coding' done. And given the time it takes, i wonder if ANY of the top level maintainers actually program anymore, and are just "patch gateways".
And yes, there is a massive caste of priesthood of the patch series, discussing and making decisions on stuff they often borderline understand, and on criteria that are in fact quite far from the "it make sense" line of thinking.
I know, I've spend months re-writing drivers which were perfectly fine, neat, written with the upmost care of "upstreaming" as our team could figure out, to have to rewrite them completely and entirelly in the whim of someone halfway across the world, who didn't couldn't possibly have known what we were working on (as we were the designers, mostly) but who decided that version of the "canon" was not matching ours.
It's a stupid waste of time, money, brain cells, and the result is actually lesser than the original code.
For no good reason as the canon will change next year anyway.
For many years, I thought that the Linux kernel ecosystem was pretty much self-sufficient, but it's grown way too big, to the level of MASSIVE bloatware level nowadays. Massive corps have dozens of guys working on it, and many of them are also 'maintainers' -- full time; threading patches, some of them with conflicts of interest, or lack of understanding, or both, or just having been left behind a while back while still being innundated with patches.
I think it's doomed, in that form anyway.