But Linus is not god and is prone to his own biases. The fact that he's at the top and reviews all the commits is simply a product of history more than anything

But Linus is not god and is prone to his own biases. The fact that he's at the top and reviews all the commits is simply a product of history more than anything. I'm sure there have been several "average" developers that have worked on kernel code and submitted it just by the shear effort needed to maintain such a large code base. I guess, my original point is, there will be "average" developers committing to the kernel just by statistics alone.