Arguably, if the situation is the one described, I'm not sure what "the best maintainer" is. :( Changing name and leaving the old project eventually die or be

Arguably, if the situation is the one described, I'm not sure what "the best maintainer" is. :( Changing name and leaving the old project eventually die or be subsumed by the fork (like egcs did with gcc) would have probably been a better choice.