From my experience dealing with upstreaming, it has become more of some sort of priesthood that is required to go thru the proper mantras and speak the proper l

From my experience dealing with upstreaming, it has become more of some sort of priesthood that is required to go thru the proper mantras and speak the proper language. And most of the priest no longer have any real idea of what's the real world is doing with the kernel. I've spent a few months upstreaming a subsystem earlier last year, something that had been tested in the field, at customers, and I had to literally gut it to fit the priesthood's way of doing things. Ultimately the result that went into the kernel was technically /inferior/ to the original source, and any rant about /that/ was pointedly ignored. I'm not even going to mention the device tree binding, which has become as bad as the high days of XML where the format took a life of it's own and requires it's own maintainers. It's completely bonkers. I think since a lot of maintainers became 'professionals' they no longer use linux. They just juggle patches all day and talk between themselves and their clique. And as long as it fits the big tech company that pay them, it doesn't matter if it's actually /useful/ to anyone else.