You're trying to refute a much stronger claim than I actually made. I was pointing out these differences to explain why what's best for the Linux kernel might

You're trying to refute a much stronger claim than I actually made. I was pointing out these differences to explain why what's best for the Linux kernel might not be best for another project. I wasn't saying email is bad, that it couldn't be the best for any other project, etc. The space of projects for which email is a good choice might be larger than just the Linux kernel, but it's much much smaller than the whole space of open-source projects as well. Given this community's tendency to cargo-cult whatever the highest-profile projects do without thinking about how different circumstances might affect applicability, I thought it was worth highlighting.