As Dave said: > Given the choice between maintaining Linus' trust that I won't merge 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code and merging 100,000 lines of abstract

As Dave said: > Given the choice between maintaining Linus' trust that I won't merge 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code and merging 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code I'll give you one guess where my loyalties lie. He is acting in a way he thinks would keep Linus' trust. Also, usually the maintainers have far superior technical knowledge of their areas to Linus. I mean, Linus is just one guy and each maintainer have their own specialty.