This lifecycle also has the natural benefit of letting the earlier, more product essential patches stew and iterate for a bit before finally maturing and being

This lifecycle also has the natural benefit of letting the earlier, more product essential patches stew and iterate for a bit before finally maturing and being pushed upstream. Nobody in the process wants to revisit a big patch a couple months after finally getting something upstreamed to find that 70% of it has been replaced by something better or different, and now the upstreaming of that is a big pain and causing kernel churn. Letting big stuff mature in a large extra-kernel ecosystem (such as android) is good for everyone (as long as it actually does make it into the kernel eventually if it's good).