Possibly. It also seems like the changes would've added an amount of technical debt that wasn't acceptable to him ("garbage MSR writes" in and out of the kerne

Possibly. It also seems like the changes would've added an amount of technical debt that wasn't acceptable to him ("garbage MSR writes" in and out of the kernel). I could understand why he'd want to avoid a bad solution (that would also have to be maintained long-term) just because Intel is unwilling to fix it on their end.