I would probably get drawn into more lengthy discussions. It's important to note that when Richard said that Magit should be "part of Emacs", that really meant

I would probably get drawn into more lengthy discussions. It's important to note that when Richard said that Magit should be "part of Emacs", that really meant "part of GNU Elpa and/or GNU Emacs". If Magit is just made part of Elpa (which I believe is all that Richard wants), then that doesn't change much. We get protection at the cost of the assignment overhead. But I already wanted to add parts of Magit to Emacs itself anyway. Low-level libraries that are useful beyond Magit itself, and which would benefit from being built-in. That includes some existing ui libraries but also new libraries I intend to write to replace old abstractions used in Magit, such as a file-handler for Git blobs and trees. Magit would benefit if other Git related packages used those, instead of everyone reinventing the wheel. Once some code is part of Emacs itself it will be more difficult to change than if it were living in a separate repository. On the bright side, that would likely motivate me to write tools to make that process less painful.