Having worked on other large projects with a maintainer model - there is a general lack of ownership. The engineer who is trying to get their patch merged does

Having worked on other large projects with a maintainer model - there is a general lack of ownership. The engineer who is trying to get their patch merged doesn’t feel ownership of the project, and the maintainer rarely feels ownership of any particular CR. I don’t know if any better model for a project like Linux, but I’d bet good money that neither author nor maintainer felt like they owned the fix for this bug.