There's a side of this that I agree with, however there's other sides. The reason I've been in the code base a bunch is because I've taken on support of forks

There's a side of this that I agree with, however there's other sides. The reason I've been in the code base a bunch is because I've taken on support of forks bootstrapped by others in various scenarios. Design safety goes a fairly long way, but it's so easy to screw up patching code shaped this way. I might trust the core, but I don't trust external patches. The problem in practice is, distros can't help themselves.