I was in the storage industry back when the unfortunate events happened (even knew an engineer who was personal friends with Reiser). My take is that: 1) Reis

I was in the storage industry back when the unfortunate events happened (even knew an engineer who was personal friends with Reiser). My take is that: 1) ReiserFS had some innovative features, but was also known for shredding data; in fact I personally lost data to some kind of bug in the driver, not as a result of hardware failure. So it didn't have a great reputation among professionals. 2) Some of the really useful features were also provided by competing file systems like XFS and ZFS; also, EFS was getting better every day. Many sysops sidestepped to those (over a period of several years) and called it done. 3) A number of ReiserFS capabilities were focused on saving disk space at the expense of performance. (IIRC it was block packing and inode-only storage for small files, but it's been a while and I could be misremembering.) These were effectively obsoleted by the drive industry's polynomial increases in storage capacity. 4) AFAIK it was a one-man show, there wasn't a cadre of contributors and maintainers to carry it forward. So combined with what you said, it wasn't compelling enough a project to resume development even with a rename.